SLOW MAKING, RADICAL CARE AND COLLECTIVE CRAFT
Irina Kaldewey Studio
Irina Kaldewey Studio is the extended arm of my artistic practice — a space for shared learning, creative exploration, and collective reflection.
Rooted in the values that guide my own work, the studio invites others to engage in sociopolitical themes and artistic processes that center care, resistance, and the reimagining of value.
I develop projects in collaboration with local communities to explore what we value — from labor and land to tradition, sustainability, and craft. Together, we investigate how stories, materials, and gestures can hold space for memory, justice, and transformation.
The studio also serves as a platform to deepen the themes I work with:
gender-based oppression, exploited labor and land, and resistance shaped by communal, sustainable, and caring ways of living — with each other, the earth, and all living beings.
Irina Kaldewey Studio is a space for creativity, collaboration, and conversation.
"We must learn to absorb and influence others more than they absorb or influence us." Léopold Sédar Senghor
Project Stories
Project X - Story Unfolding
This project traces the invisible weight of navigating artistic practice within bureaucratic opacity, silence, and everyday resistance — from unanswered emails to subtle threats at the door. Each chapter unfolds an experience, a gesture, a refusal. It brings together fragments: messages, screenshots, sounds, stillness, timelines — not always with clarity, but with intention. Project X names what is often unnamed — the emotional labor, the waiting, the navigating of systems that promise support but echo with absence.
These are not only stories of artistic labor, but of being heard, ignored, dismissed, threatened, silenced — and still continuing.
LES PERSONNES RÉELLES – Communauté, Travail et Terre (in development for 2026)
LES PERSONNES RÉELLES (2026)
A participatory project rooted in rural Senegal, this work centers community, memory, and material through collective weaving, local storytelling, and shared making. It is not only about textile, but about listening, gathering, and imagining new ways of being together.
An invitation to create with care, and to listen with the hands.
An invitation to create with care, and to listen with the hands.
Movimento para as Pessoas (ongoing)
Movimento para as Pessoas (ongoing)
A Portugal-based initiative that brings together art, community, and care. Currently in development, this project seeks to create gentle spaces for encounter — through workshops, open gatherings, and collaborative creative processes that foreground dignity, justice, and slowness.
It grows from the belief that softness can be a form of resistance.
Alma (2025)
Rooted in a shared exploration of space, memory, and material, Alma was a collaborative project realized in Tunis, Tunisia — in partnership with the Architecture Department at the Supérieure d'Architecture, d'Audiovisuel et de Design (ESAD), the Ceramic Class at the École d'Art et de Décoration (EAD), and local poets and musicians.
It brought together movement, making, and language as a way of listening — to place, to sound, and to the soul. The project was supported by the Goethe-Institut and Culture Moves Europe.
A sculptural installation exploring inner freedom, soul, and the dissolving of imposed structures — through woven metal, sound, and shared creation in Tunis.
Valuable Textiles / Resist ance
This project began with a white handwoven stola — created during my final year of fashion studies — as a response to a system that nearly excluded me. Rather than following the expected path of producing a collection, I committed to one deeply researched, thoughtfully crafted garment.
It reflects values I had explored in depth — care, responsibility, sustainability, and justice — and stands as both a personal and political act. In a time shaped by speed and visibility, this work honors the slow, the quiet, and the meaningful.
A conceptual textile work developed in resistance to fashion industry norms — and to academic expectations of productivity.
Themes We Work With
Value
What do we value — and why?
A reflection on material, time, and care as currency.
Labor
Whose hands shape the world?
On visible and invisible work, dignity, and exploitation.
Land
What does it mean to make in relation to the earth?
Exploring site, soil, sustainability, and belonging.
Resistance
The soft and strong ways we stand.
A look at refusal, slow gestures, and ancestral knowledge.
Irina Kaldewey
My practice is
a way of listening, questioning, and grounding values — in material, in place, and in relation.
Rooted in sculpture and shaped by the act of weaving, I work across forms to explore resistance, care, and connection. Whether through wire, textile, or gesture, each piece asks what it means to value — and how we hold space for one another and the land.