A Participatory Upcycling & Textile Cartography Workshop

Black Box Residency Workshop: Neal Davids

Registration required (scroll down for the form)

At the intersection of Ghanaian textile culture and Rotterdam’s identity as a global port, Mapped Threads of Arrival invites participants to explore upcycling as a language of memory, movement and belonging. In both Ghana and Rotterdam, material and people are constantly in transit, and this workshop brings these worlds into dialogue through a collective act of making.

Guided by the question What’s your story?, participants reflect on origin, influence, loss and future direction, translating their reflections into textile form using reclaimed materials such as discarded garments, denim scraps, African print fragments and Ghanaian cocoa jute sack cloth. Working on A4-sized tie-dye fabric bases, each participant creates two identical textile maps through stitching, layering, wrapping or mark-making. One map is kept as a personal artifact; the second becomes part of a growing collective work.

Each piece is accompanied by a Transit Record, a poetic document inspired by shipping tags, noting origin, transformation and arrival. Together, the individual maps merge into a large-scale collective cartography: a stitched landscape of shared movement and memory. Rooted in Ghanaian philosophies such as Sankofa and communal cloth traditions, this workshop reframes upcycling as an act of cultural repair and collective storytelling. This is not about perfect sewing — it is about mapping value, memory and movement through cloth.

Please bring one item you’d like to upcycle or include, such as a piece of fabric, clothing or a small personal object.

Language: English

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This workshop is part of NÉNÉ’s Black Box Residency at MOMO Festival 2026, in which she collaborates with Neal and Kwasi to explore textile as a language of identity, resistance and storytelling. Read more about the residency here.

The visit of Neal Davids and Kwasi Darko is made possible by the International Visitors Programme of the Nieuwe Instituut with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.