Workshops by Ola Korbańska & Sana López Abellán
Location: KB National Library, Den Haag
The KB, National Library of the Netherlands is an archive of words. But words do not only live on paper. They are also chanted, placed on banners, engraved in metal and wood, woven into fabric, whispered and passed on.
In this new programme series, developed in collaboration with KB National Library, we explore the library as a living place: a place where knowledge is not only preserved, but also created. Each programme brings together makers, participants and the KB collection.
What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary? with Ola Korbańska
Collective feminist banner making workshop
Friday 23 October 1-6pm
How to formulate ideas in a poetic, clear or perhaps radical way? We welcome you to this workshop, during which we will explore the practice of textile banner making and create a collective artwork guided by artist Ola Korbańska. We will find pleasure in composing feminist slogans through writing exercises, dive into the subject of text in art and public space, and think of textiles as a soft medium for manifesting our objections and desires. “What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary?” asks Audre Lorde in her text "The Uses of the Erotic." We will try to find out, but most of all, to become one.
Sign up here!
Ola Korbańska is a visual artist and writer working with textiles and text, centering feminist and gender-oriented perspectives. She creates large-scale, site-specific installations in public spaces alongside more intimate pieces, using collections of quotes, encountered phrases, and single words that reflect the existing state of affairs. She is the author of texts published in numerous publications. Currently based in Berlin.
Divinatory Textile Bundles with Sana López Abellán
A workshop transforming beeswax figures into personal amulets
Friday 6 November 2-6pm
Divinatory textile bundles are approached in this workshop as small, handmade objects for thinking forward, made by shaping intentions in beeswax and wrapping them in personal textiles so that bundling becomes a way of actively projecting a future, not waiting for one to be revealed.
This workshop explores the parallels between artists, curators, and diviners, drawing inspiration from African basket divination practices in which miniature figures are cast to interpret possible futures. Rather than waiting for outcomes to be revealed through divination, participants are invited to actively manifest their desired futures by creating the divinatory objects themselves.
We will carve objects we wish to identify with in beeswax, miniatures. Alluding to the Ex Voto European traditions as well as worldwide materializations of fate like African Basket divinations.
Participants will sculpt small figurative miniatures in beeswax, a material associated with transformation and ritual. These figures represent personal intentions, aspirations, or projected life paths. Once completed, they will be wrapped into textile bundles, transforming them into personal amulets that embody agency, and self-fulfilment.
From Nahua tlaquimilōlli and Maya tz'ite divination bundles to Tibetan knotted ritual cords, Japanese omamori amulets, and European folk-magic knot bundles, divinatory power is repeatedly imagined as something that must be wrapped, knotted, bound, and ritually handled in textile form in order to be activated and controlled. This workshop situates itself within this global cultural phenomenon, where textiles mediate relationships between the human and the divine.
Participants are invited to bring a small textile fragment from their personal history, which will be used to wrap the beeswax figures. Often associated with burial or ancestral rites, sacred bundles are here reimagined as bundles of projection.
Sign up here!
Sana López Abellán is a Dutch/Spanish curator, artist and anthropologist based in Spain. Her work is centred around transcending disciplines, oscillating between theory and practice and between the tactile and the symbolic. She has been involved in a variety of exhibition projects in The Netherlands, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Cyprus and Spain as well as coordinating public art commissions for contemporary artists in the United States. Trained in curating at EINA, Barcelona and the Node Centre for Curatorial Studies, Berlin, she brings her background in anthropology and material culture from Leiden University, The Netherlands, specialising in the relationship between the body and indigenous textiles in the Ecuadorian Andes.