STUDIO STEGE - THE NETHERLANDS
“Led by Bianka Stege — weaver, art historian and storyteller — STUDIO STEGE works at the intersection of craft knowledge, material research, and artistic practice. Our work asks what textiles remember and what they can still carry forward. For XTANT 2026, we present two new hand-woven objects under the shared title Nomad: No Sail and No Kimono. Each begins with deep historical research — Viking sail construction from 8th–11th century Scandinavia; Japanese kimono textile logic — and then, deliberately, departs from it. In each object, one panel breaks the system. Not as error. As authorship.
No Sail is woven from Dutch wool — Drents Heideschaap and Swifter (handspunt) — fibres drawn from native breeds, spun by local hands, warm beige and oat in natural undyed tones. Five panels follow Viking archaeological evidence in structure, proportion, and weave. The sixth panel is the artist’s own voice. No Kimono is woven in black wool, following traditional Japanese proportions. The left front panel is wild silk: coarse, warm, orange-beige-black — the rupture that makes the whole legible.
Both objects are made entirely from natural materials —wool, wild silk, hemp bolt rope — chosen not for nostalgia but for accountability. As a member of Fibershed Netherlands, Studio Stege works within a circular textile culture where fibres are traceable, local, and biodegradable. Wool from sheep whose names we know. Silk that carries the irregularity of living things. Hemp that will, eventually, return to soil.
Bianka reflects: "I am trained as an art historian and as a weaver and I refuse to keep those two things separate. Historical textile knowledge is not archive material — it is living technique, still relevant, still generative. When I weave a Viking sail from hand-spun Dutch wool, I am not reconstructing the past. I am testing it. And when I allow one panel to refuse the system, I am doing what every nomad does: I carry the tradition fully, and then I put it down somewhere new."
Nomad continues Studio Stege's ongoing investigation into textiles as vessels — for memory, for knowledge, for the relationship between maker, material, and time. Where our previous project Bridges: Four Shrouds for Life explored the circle of life through ceremonial cloth, Nomad asks a different question: what does it mean to carry a tradition across a distance and to arrive changed?
These objects cannot sail. They cannot be worn. They hang still, in Palma, far from the North Sea and the Pacific — and that distance is exactly what they are about. What travels, changes. What hangs still, reveals.”
-Taken from STUDIO STEGE
