Jorge Penades comes from Andalucia, the largest olive oil producing region in the world, responsible for over 20% of the world’s production and 80% of Spain’s own. At home, he started asking questions about the industry and then spent more than ten years trying to answer them.
The result of this research is Rooted V01an exhibition developed with Seetal Solanki, organized at Espacio Gaviota that combined furniture, material experiments and immersive installations. The work focused on one key issue: the industrialization of olive cultivation in Andalusia had created a huge surplus of waste from hundred-year-old root systems, strange and beautiful and useless from the timber industry. With Rooted, Penadés worked to document these wastes and develop a methodology to work with them.
Jorge Penadés and Daniele Lora © DSL Studio
Rooted by Jorge Penadés © Riccardo De Vecchi
Uprooted carpet V02 by Jorge Penadés and cc-tapis © DSL Studio
Rooted by Jorge Penadés © Riccardo De Vecchi
Robotufting process © DSL Studio
Rooted by Jorge Penadés © Riccardo De Vecchi
Uprooted carpet details by Jorge Penadés © DSL Studio
Now, me Rooted V02the designer chose to explore another great Spanish industry: wool. Spain is the largest producer of wool in the EU, however, it is unfortunately sinking globally due to the increase in demand for cheaper synthetic fibres. To draw attention to the material, Penadés developed a carpet in the Milanese workshop of cc-tapis, which was recently presented at Matter and Shape in Paris in March 2026.
For the carpet, the team worked with deadstock wool, fibers that had already been produced but had no existing market destination. The rug is reversible, combining three undyed wools, various pile heights and graduated yarn thickness, in an attempt to reproduce what olive roots look like: their grain, density and shape. The project creates a dialogue between wood and wool, two materials deeply embedded in the Mediterranean landscape. We had a brief chat with the designer about his Rooted project and his future plans for it.
When you decided to extend Unrooted to wool, was that always part of the original architecture of the project or did it come out of nowhere?
Jorge Penades:
“Extending Rooted to wool was not part of the original idea. The first phase of the project focused on an isolated element within a production system: the olive. In this second phase, the project expands to look at the ecosystem more holistically, looking at other interrelated elements, one of which is sheep. This shift allows research to develop a wider palette of materials and move towards a more systemic understanding of value in agricultural production landscapes.“
You have been working with scrap materials for a long time, for example using skin scraps in Structural Skin, over ten years ago. Is Rooted a continuation of that logic, or has your relationship with waste and value changed over the past decade?
Jorge Penades:
“I think a significant part of my work revolves around the idea of re-signaling. Previous projects, such as Structural Skin, dealt with waste materials primarily through reuse, finding new ways to work with what was already there. Rooted continues this line of research, but the approach has shifted slightly. I am now less interested in waste as a physical condition and more in how it is culturally and economically constructed. In this sense, Rooted moves from reuse to re-marking, questioning the frameworks that define value and proposing alternative readings of what already exists.“
What would you like to explore next with the Unrooted series?
Jorge Penades:
“see It was uprooted evolves as an open framework rather than a closed series. Moving forward, I am interested in expanding the research in different areas by participating with local industries it is linked to the olive oil sector, one of the cornerstones of our Mediterranean culture.“
