Our workshop playlist.

XTANT Huaca 2025

Photograph by @openstudio79

Only a month is left until the coming of spring, and we have about 70 days to go until the opening. We are as terrified as we are exhilarated.

Through this last two weeks five workshops by outstanding artists that generously agreed to share their life’s work have gone online.

And, to ensure that you haven’t missed any of them in your own sea of notifications, (We’d know.) let us present part one of Huaca 2025’s workshops.

You won’t want to miss it.

Winner of the 2020 ‘artisan innovateur’ and ‘Coup de cœur’  prizes among many other accomplishments Laurine Malengreau is coming to XTANT to share the knowledge and techniques behind her craft.

From Aubusson, a french town world-renown for textile art, she made a name for herself by being the only artisan in the region to make large scale works with Nuno Silk.

Nuno Silk is a light, airy silk fabric felted together with wool. Using it, Laurine composes mesmerising works reminiscent of the loose brushstrokes that you’d see in late impressionist paintings.

Colors blending together in a dizzying array that feels like the hazy sight of something far-far away.

In the workshop, participants will learn this new form of a centuries old European art.

From France to Japan! More common than you’d think.

In Shizuoka prefecture, WARA specialises in creating traditional decorations, sacred objects, and above all designing beautiful immersive spaces.

From teahouses, to bars to collaborations with architectural and design firms, WARA introduces their dutiful care for environment design and traditional objects.

Focused on another art form, WARA’s workshop will teach the history behind and process of crafting Shimenawa.

Created from thatch or rice straw, shimenawa are ropes bound together into forms that are used to represent the boundary or meeting point between the broader world and the sacred.

As part of her work, she also collaborated with the musician MEITEI to create the calming, atmospheric EP 'Risshun’. Give it a listen!

Photograph by Will Freeman

And now we split the difference between France and Japan to stop at the halfway point: India.

Center of this workshop is ‘Bandhani’ a dying method from the northwestern corner of the country, specifically the provinces bordering Pakistan, where Abduljabbar Khatri’s ancestors practiced their craft for some four centuries

Fabric is plucked and tied with precision creating dynamic, often floral patterns in the contrast between the piece’s base color and the die that is applied over it. Similar, though slightly different in technique to ‘Shibori’ another craft practice in Japan.

Participants in the workshop shall learn the process step by step as they dye one of many patterns onto a scarf that they get to take all the way back home with them.

Much like our last subject, north west India was also the origin of Mahatma Gandhi. And it is during his later life’s work, marching across British occupied India in the movement for independence, that the invention the workshop is concerned with was made.

The box charkha, a spinning wheel folded into itself as to take the form of a carrying case that wouldn’t look out of place next to old premium leather luggage.

To avoid too much repetition, if want to learn more about Shamji Bhai’s work, you can see our last newsletter, dedicated to him.

In this workshop attendees will learn the manual spinning of thread as it was done before complete automation. Being guided in the gentle push and pull required to spin a yarn, just like the Mahatma all those decades ago.

And lastly from India we land in England.

Where Katerina, inspired by Buddhist beliefs — a philosophy Indian in origin — brings us her Embroidery workshop ‘Stitching with earth’s sacred offerings’.

Good save right?

Interweaving parts of the nature that surrounds her everyday life in the English country with embroidery, each piece tells the story of the corner of the world where it was first thought of.

Though bringing all of materials required across the all too common England-Mallorca flight, participants are allowed to, even encouraged to bring or source their own flowers or materials that they might wish to see embroidered into the pieces they’ll make.

Do check the pictures of her and everyone else’s work, they features in galleries, exhibitions and all sorts of global events for a reason.

Photograph by @gourabganguli

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