EL PONE LA MUSICA, NOSOTROS BAILAMOS | MANUELA LORENTE

Manuela Lorente (1991, Madrid) is a young photographer whose work blurs the line between fiction and reality. She uses photography as a means to both document and reimagine Spanish popular culture, tradition, and folklore. Starting from a real-life element — a face, a street, an everyday interaction — she constructs narratives that transport the image into a fictional realm, often with the suspenseful flair of a thriller.
Her stories originate in what she observes and captures on the street: people, architecture, atmospheres. From these visual fragments, Lorente weaves narratives, turning each photograph into a frame from an imaginary film — written and directed by herself. The characters she encounters or invents are often filtered through cultural stereotypes and collective imagery, which she reinterprets with irony and a critical eye. When the story demands it and reality falls short, Lorente recreates scenes and environments, building photographic sets to shoot new images. Her artistic practice emerges from the fusion of documentary and staged photography, combining photojournalism with narrative invention in a distinctive and spontaneous way.
In 2021, she published Él pone la música, nosotros bailamos, a project that tells the story of two brothers with dreams of becoming mafiosi. They survive on petty thefts in their neighborhood, nurturing fantasies of glory inspired by gangster films. One day, they receive a tip about a shipment of valuable French relics hidden in Galicia. Convinced they’re about to land the heist of a lifetime, they set off — only to mistakenly steal a load of ordinary jugs. This misunderstanding sets off a series of adventures.
Close-up shots, saturated colors, and dynamic compositions don’t clearly reveal the action but instead cloak it in mystery, inviting the viewer’s imagination to fill in the gaps. In doing so, the artist seems to relinquish part of her “authorial control,” allowing room for personal interpretations and actively engaging the viewer.
Looking at a work from the series, we’re naturally prompted to ask: what liquor are the brothers toasting with? Where did they find those glasses shaped like female bodies? What are they celebrating — another successful robbery, perhaps? And where exactly are we in the story?
Él pone la música, nosotros bailamos is part of a larger project titled ¿Es usted quien creo que es?, consisting of six visual stories set in Madrid. Like chapters of a novel, each tells a different, self-contained story, all united by a tone of irony and a vivid aesthetic in which tradition, popular culture, and urban identity intertwine.
With this work, Manuela Lorente offers a poetic and social x-ray of Madrid, where imagination, absurdity, and everyday life coexist in a single frame.

© Manuela Lorente, from the series El pone la Musica, Nosotros Bailamos, 2021.

17/05/25