An incomplete map of this year’s artists and their countries of origin.

This Year’s Artists.

Starting from last year, we began to make a world map of the artists exhibiting or selling in the year’s edition of XTANT. Software limitations are seen more directly when some artists, who lacked an online presence are harder to link, or when indigenous communities such as this year with Buryatia, or the Mixtec people can’t be placed on their own, as the google system only recognises the countries they exist under.

Nevertheless, this year will host somewhere around 90 total artists from over 35 different countries, which will be periodically added onto the map, as VISA’s are processed and flights, unfortunately inconsistent from certain countries as of now, are confirmed.

For now though, the page already includes a lot of this year's new artists, as well as many returning faces which you might recognise.

A Final Workshop List:

After months of frantic back and forth’s, a completed list of this year’s workshops is done.

Everything from teaching cordage practices, elaborate embroidery, boro - patchwork, Gujarati Tie Dye practices, Ancient traditions of printing patterns on fabric with real silver, to primers on the knitting techniques of the Mapuche people in Chile, knot button making emblematic of the old historic shirts and jackets of Buryatia and North Asian communities, and the creation of sekimori stones that draw invisible boundaries in buddhist temples across Japan.

And even more.

The selection of workshops this year has let us explore a wider array of topics and practices than ever before and we’re happy to be able to share it with you all.

We live in a world of contradictions. And forces that seemed like unstoppable vehicles of progress, have always contained within them unforeseen consequences that can run in entirely different directions.

In the industrial revolution, the crowded shop-floors of conveyor-belt factories that gave men like Henry Ford eye-watering wealth also created the connections between their employees that brought about labour unions and wage increases. The incredible growth of production, created a crisis of overproduction, which has made most experts now stress the necessity of scaling back the level at which we make and throw away products.

By that same token, while it is a great irony that one of the tools behind the slow revival of artisan craft is the Internet — the most monopolised, most ‘non-artisanal’ industry of our modern era — it’s not that odd that it has given us this unprecedented opportunity to nurture and preserve artisan textiles.

See you in three weeks!