Felting on silk, mineral and organic matter
200 x 150 cm
For this piece my research centers on materiality as a means of preserving history and how, in the case of the island of Naxos, this “memory” of the ancient world endures thanks to the mineral realm. The mineral substrate shaped by these ancient civilizations, these interventions in the landscape or in mineral elements is what we seek to preserve in order to connect with a wisdom (and a power) of the past and its contrast with all that has been lost over time, with a specific focus on textiles.
I want to address the “construction” of these archaeological spaces that exist in a certain ambiguity between the protected and the forgotten and that convey a certain sense of fragility, the idea of a fragmented discourse. Among the gaps of what is missing, a sort of scar of memory grows, with which one attempts to repair and unite the parts.
I want to revisit the “ephemeral” nature of textile fibers as that lost world to which we will never have access, in contrast to the mineral substrate that gives substance to the reconstruction and a geological memory. Trying to imagine what is lost: rituals, smells, songs… And what an amalgam of what remains, what is lost, and what is reconstructed could be.
The raw wool and the little stones and organic matter were collected at Naxos island as part of the research process.
This piece was part of the first Cycladic Art Biennial, August 2026.
Wood, felted wool, seeds, bones, resin and organic found elements.
Low temperature ceramic, stone, water.
“Offering to the Elements” emerges as an attempt to connect with other realms. The realms of the elementals of water, air, earth, and fire. These are the elements that ancient peoples believed everything was made of, though they also believed that their existence was, in turn, grounded in an invisible composition.
It is an offering to the spirit of matter.
The piece is a wool felt work that incorporates materials such as seeds, bones, resin, and a rock. In its forms, we recognize the shapes of solar, lunar, and terrestrial energy, as well as animal and plant motifs: all integrated into a single body, the body of all that exists.
Exhibited at Lofos Art Project in November 2025 as part of Threads for Our Times, a major group exhibition of contemporary textile art.
Altars of memory, body, place.
2025
Felted wool and silk and tapestry textile intallation
300 x 80 cm
Performance El Cuerpo saborea/The body tastes in Šopa Gallery
“To weave is to remember.
To eat is to know.
To build an altar is to return home.”
The exhibition topologies of resistance: altars of memory, body, place, presents a sensorial installation shaped through slowness, intimacy, and transformation, developed by artists Roshni Kavate and Violeta Ortega Navarrete in KAIR Residency in Košice, Slovakia.
The intersection of both artists’ practices lies in their shared interest in working with textiles as a medium of care and return, not in the nostalgic sense, but as an act of reconnection or reactivation of memory, linking back to their Indigenous lineages from India and Mexico. This connection reflects ancestral knowledge stored in the body, in gestures, or within the structure of the fabric itself.
In their creative process, the authors have long observed a persistent connection between eco-feminist thinking, anthropological sensibility and ritual practice. These are not abstract frameworks, but lived and embodied experiences—reflected in using natural materials as carriers of stories and cycles, interweaving individual and collective memory, and ritual as a means of artistic expression, healing, remembrance, and reconnection.
The altar emerges as a central symbolic and spatial element of the installation. Informed by Mexican and Indian traditions, the altar is conceived as an intimate, spiritual site—a bridge between the personal and the collective, the visible and the invisible. Simultaneously, it functions as an embodied archive: through scent, sound, silence, and the arrangement of objects, it holds and activates memory.
In this context, the altar is not sacred in a conventional religious sense—it sanctifies the everyday: weaving, storytelling, foraging, remembering, grieving. It becomes a space where emotions are made tangible, and the viewer’s presence transforms the space into a collective ritual. The altar becomes an altar through our presence.
The installation is structured as a multi-sensory environment, a living organism composed of memory, body, and place. Memory—woven, cyclical, shaped by the rhythm of words and hands. Body—assembled through gesture, knots, touch, and scent. Place—a site for solitude and community, contemplation and togetherness.
The artists used regenerated wool and natural pigments from local plants (dandelion and nettle) gathered around Košice. Other components—such as textile ribbons hand-dyed with natural pigments—emerged from participatory sessions with the local community. The resulting textiles become not only archives of the local landscape, but also of the body and memory of each participant. They form a language, a trace, a subtle act of resistance.
Roshni & Violeta expands the work through a speculative framework that resists linear time by weaving together past and future. In this view, weaving becomes an act of resistance, making and maintaining space for what is fragile, uncertain, and vital. Grief is not a conclusion, but a portal. Care is not an outcome, but a method.
This exhibition is, above all, an invitation: to gather, to listen, to remember, to share presence. It is not about returning but about reconfiguring a new topology of memory, body, and place.
Monika Pádejová, curator.
The program was supported using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council. The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of this project. The Residency program was also supported by Mesto Košice.
2025
Ceramic and wool
Embracing the ecological call of collaboration in difference, a creative bond emerges that is nourished by sensitive dialogues, explorations with materiality and dense memories that transcend the vital trajectories of each artist, marked by the elusive presence of water.
Ritual as a channel to address the aqueous actant acquires strength in this collective installation that puts life at the center, and with it, also death. And, in the middle of the journey, it opens contemplative fields to imagine the infinite possibilities of individual and community transformation, towards other forms of coexistence between species in the Anthropocene.
Waters allow themselves to be affected and affect everything in their path, transforming matter.
Violeta Ortega Navarrete’s contribution emerges through a sculpture that embodies the aqueous foundation of ceramics to express itself organically and welcome the otherness of the woolen weaves in an encounter that evokes the intimate underground life, as a metaphor for the emotional world of living beings. With this piece she explores invisible dimensions: that which escapes the light. And, with this, the place of intuition, the possible memory of waters and their similarities with human memory.
Do we inhabit the waters or do the waters inhabit us?
How does collaboration flow in the human creative field?
How do we transform the drought of loss?
Beyond the bodies of water, in this synergy of artists there is a call to listen attentively to the language of the waters. An invocation, a joint desire for repair that finds in this place and in this time a point of confluence before opening up to the sea.
Lorena Álvarez Chávez, curator.
This piece was exhibited in Tangent Projects Barcelona, fall 2025.
Textile installation
Knitted and felted wool
200 x 200 x 200 cm
Felting Workshop in NART
It is made of multiple chains of wool, hanging, tighten or simply rest on the ground, extending. These allude to organic forms of non-human construction such as animal cocoons, nests, spiders webs, roots & organic structures in general. With the idea of respecting the environment, reducing the impact of our lives on the planet, the installation is made of fibers in their natural colors (not dyed).
The installation was made in Narva as part of the Artist Residency program of NART and is was exhibited in Kreenholm Factory for Artist's Day of Narva, spring 2025.
2024
Felted wool and silk
106 x 80 cm
It is a felting in neutral colors, almost without chromatic contrast in which harmonious and symmetrical “ flows ” are intertwined, alluding to the symmetry of nature in form and also in materiality, since everything is biodegradable.
This piece was part of Textile Encounter of Hilaku in Zaragoza , Spain 2024.
2022
Aluminum and leather tapestry
accuses, incites.
Bonfire of Fury as an invocation to our anger, our inner fury, our demons, and against them. To exorcise our anger, to add fuel to the fire so that it burns.
Dos Caprichosas
This piece was part of Fogata de Furia (Bonfire of Fury) collective Exhibition in Islera.
Information
For me, working with textile fibers means honoring their materiality. The fibers embody the nature of the landscape, the physicality of the animal and plant bodies that gave rise to them, and they bear the imprint of my own body as I reconfigure them.
I am interested in the possibility of (the creation of) textiles as spaces of convergence for sharing, conversing, and building relationships of care and reciprocity with other beings and with the material world that sustains us.
Born in Mexico City, her work has been mostly in the field of fibres and textiles. She has specialised in traditional techniques such as weaving, knitting, felting and embroidery, among others. Violeta takes up these traditionally feminine techniques to address topics such as contemplation, the recognition of the sacred in nature, the ancestral wisdom heritage and the healing capacity of art, through the act of weaving and experimenting with materials.
She works with materials such as wool, natural fibres and dyes to explore themes that may lead to reflection on how we could relate to our environment and other beings through care and empathy.
She holds a bachelor's degree in Textile Design from the School of Design at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico and a bachelor's degree in Hispanic Language and Literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
In 2020, she co-founded Islera, an independent space for artistic experimentation and cultural cooperation located in Mexico City.
She has shown her work at:
• The Mares of Diomedes, group exhibition, Surgery Gallery, London, December 2025
• Myths for our times, group exhibition, Lofos Art Project, Athens, November 2025
• Weaving waters, group exhibition, Tangent Projects, Barcelona, October 2025
• Continuity NART Artist Residency, Estonia, June-July 2025
• Practices of Care, KAIR Košice Artist Residency, Slovakia, April-May 2025
• Textile encounter Hilaku, Zaragoza, Spain, November 2024
• Grounding, Domatio, Athens, July 2024
• Mirada Unificada,Tangent Projects, Barcelona, 2023
• Art Fair Estación Material, Guadalajara, Mexico 2023
• Connected Women, Rosa Gorila, in Mexico City 2023
• Everything Solid Vanishes, Torre Andrade, Guanajuato, Mexico 2022
• Enstasis, solo exhibition, Islera, Mexico City 2022
• Second Collective Intervention by Aurora Urban Art, Casa Lacustre, Mexico City 2022
• Fury Bonfire, 2 Caprichosas collaboration with Islera, Mexico City 2022
• EN(SER)RADXS, La Nevera virtual gallery, 2021
• Daughters of Venus, digital exhibition, Faculty of Arts of the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, Mexico 2021
• Collective Art and Border Spaces (FAR): Body, Politics and Environment, La Empírica Gallery, Granada, Spain 2018
• Collective Women in Migrant Action, Espacio Metáfora, Seville, Spain 2017