Craftwork4.0All: Near Future Craft Residency

1. Reimagined and Rewoven Heritage

Tetiana Bilous 🇺🇦

Reimagined Heritage: Textile as a System of Memory

and Alina Yatsenko 🇫🇷

Rewoven Heritage: Transforamtion Through Memory, Light and Textile

This is the dialogue between heritage textile practices and contemporary approaches to perception, transformation and material storytelling.

The project considers memory not simply as something preserved in an archive or embodied in an object, but as a living structure that changes through interaction, light, movement and context. Textile becomes an active medium for revealing hidden narratives and fragments of cultural memory, inviting us to reconsider how heritage can be experienced, interpreted and transformed.

2. ×Amortypha danubii

Milena Sophia Kalte 🇵🇹 and Alba Martinez Roberto 🇪🇸

Emerging from the entanglement of a native rush, an invasive shrub, human craft and biomaterials, ×Amortypha danubii takes the Danube’s riparian ecosystem as its starting point.

The project unsettles familiar distinctions between native and invasive species, human and plant, maker and material, nature and culture. By exploring the relationships between ecological processes and human intervention, it questions how we define belonging, movement and displacement.

Who decides when a species belongs to a place? When does a landscape become native? Is all movement displacement? And when does a person become illegal?

Through these questions, the project connects ecological change with broader social and political debates about migration, borders and belonging.

3. Future of Lace: A Contemporary Approach to a Craft

Ariadne Ferreira Neves 🇵🇹 and Evangelina Bereti 🇬🇷

Can lace-making help us imagine the changing conditions of women’s lives across past, present and future?

Future of Lace explores this question through a suspended textile veil, two to three metres long, whose structure changes gradually from top to bottom. Its three sections represent different stages in the evolution of the female condition.

The upper section features a tight, rigid grid, evoking historical confinement and stereotypes. The middle section introduces a circular woven pattern, reflecting the present. At the bottom, the grid breaks apart into loose, free fibres, suggesting the possibility of liberation and transformation.

By reinterpreting a traditional craft through a contemporary lens, the project turns textile structure into a reflection on gender, social expectations and the futures women might shape.

4. Enosis

Eva Premillieu 🇫🇷 and Eirini Xanthioti 🇬🇷

Derived from the Greek word ένωση, meaning union, joining together or oneness, Enosis examines the possibilities of connection in a society increasingly shaped by polarisation.

Weaving provides both the project’s methodology and its central metaphor. The interaction between warp and weft demonstrates how distinct elements can maintain their individual characteristics while becoming part of a larger structure.

Through this approach, the project considers what it takes to build connections across differences and how craft can offer a framework for thinking about solidarity, interdependence and collective life.

5. Stinking Sweeties

Vanda Bednarikova 🇩🇪🇸🇰 and Loukia Chatzapoulou 🇬🇷

Stinking Sweeties takes the form of a two-part workshop toolkit and booklet designed to facilitate food-fermentation and sewing sessions.

Rooted in traditions of care, exchange and intergenerational, multi-gendered and multispecies interaction, the project proposes two workshop formats that bring people together around shared practices of making, preserving and transforming.

Fermentation and sewing become starting points for exploring communal responsibility and the restorative potential of care. By working with processes of containment, decomposition and transformation, the project asks how communities can create the conditions for change while learning to care for one another and the environments they inhabit.

Making Space for Different Futures

Across the five projects, craft emerges as more than a set of inherited techniques or a means of producing objects. It becomes a way to investigate complex systems, challenge established assumptions and develop new relationships with the world around us.

The Near Future Craft residency demonstrates how combining traditional knowledge with speculative design can open up new possibilities for creative practice. By bringing ideas into material form and creating space for collective experimentation, the in-person workshops helped participants explore how craft might contribute to more connected, inclusive and ecologically conscious futures.

By bringing together artisans, designers, mentors and hosts from different backgrounds, the residency created a shared space in which traditional knowledge could meet new methods of thinking, making and collaborating.