Topologies of Resistance: Altars of Care and Connection

Workshop w/ Roshni Kavate & Violeta Ortega Navarette

Seeds remember what we cannot speak

My grandmother’s hands, mapping home in soil

This land is memory inscribed on bone

We carry our fields within us, always.”

— Mahmoud Darwish

We invite you to a creative textile workshop with our residents Roshni Kavate (US/IN)  and Violeta Ortega Naverette (MX). Through their practice, they reclaim textile making as a form of archiving memories, healing, self-care, and community building. 

Topologies of Resistance: Altars of Care and Connection is a hands-on workshop exploring how gathering, creating and practices of care become acts of resistance in a world of extraction and fragmentation. In this collaborative space, we approach textiles not as mere materials but as extensions of the body, containers of gesture, and soft architectures for memory.

Through the slow gestures of painting with dandelion flowers and nettle ink, embroidering with nettle-dyed threads, and weaving found natural materials, participants will co-create a collective tapestry—a textile altar that becomes a sensorial installation shaped by slowness, intimacy, and transformation. This woven map of attention holds the residue of everyday rituals, diasporic histories, and communal exchange.

We will work with plants abundant in Košice’s landscapes—dandelion (púpava) with its rich folklore as a symbol of resilience, nettle (žihľava) known in Slovak healing traditions for renewal and vitality, and other common “weeds” that carry stories of survival. Each plant offers both pigment and metaphor, their fibers forming new ecologies that trace geographies of migration and ancestral knowledge. The shared practice is an invitation for belonging, shaped through repetition, rhythm, and presence.

Together, we will consider: How do materials from the land hold memory? What does it mean to care as a political act? How can softness be a site of strength?

Workshop is FREE and all ages are welcome

Workshop will be in English.

All materials are provided.Optional: Participants are invited to bring small foraged offerings, or objects of personal significance, or poems and text to read, to incorporate into our collective textile altar. 

No previous experience with painting or textiles is necessary—just curiosity and a willingness to participate.

More information about the artists on our website www.kair.sk/en

The residency program is supported using public funding by the Slovak Art Council. The Slovak Art Council is the main partner of this project.