We are delighted to have hosted three interesting young artists as artists in residence at the Textile Centre Haslach! From 18 February to 1 March, the Textile Centre Haslach, in cooperation with the European Textile Network, advertised three Artist in Residence places to use the existing infrastructure to realise their own projects. 35 people applied and submitted their project ideas. From these, three exciting personalities were selected:

◾ Khristina Vysotskaya from Belarus for the field of dobby weaving
◾ Katerina Nakou from Greece for the field of tufting
◾ Leonie Burkhardt from Germany, resident in Sweden, for the Jacquard weaving area

After getting to know each other and introducing their own work, everyone began to familiarise themselves with their new workplace. Elisabeth Stötzler and Andreas Selzer supported Leonie Burkard in the jacquard weaving area, who over the course of the days developed impressive three-dimensional fabrics with exciting colour gradients from various leftover yarns, which came from the weaving machine as a tube and are to be installed as tall columns in the room.

Ingrid Hackl supervised Katerina Nakou in the tufting studio, who orientated her design language on the ornaments of her native Greece and experimented intensively with different pile heights to create sculptural textile wall reliefs.

Christina Leitner, on the other hand, accompanied Khristina Vysotskaya at the computer-controlled dobby loom in the realisation of woven panels representing trees in the forests of Belarus, which were created using a sophisticated combination of dobby and tapestry techniques.

The three young women were accommodated together in the flat of the Textile Centre Haslach, less than five minutes' walk from the workshops. In the beginning, walks in the surrounding woods and excursions to studios and weaving mills near Haslach were planned. However, working on their own artworks became more intense from day to day and sometimes lasted well into the night, leaving little time for other activities. So there is a good reason to return to Haslach soon!

It was great to see how the three artists came together more and more as a group over the course of the days, cooking traditional dishes from their country for each other and actively participating in the artistic process of their colleagues. Not only each other, but also all those supporting them from the Textile Centre Haslach benefited from getting to know the different approaches and cultural backgrounds and from the intensive exchange. The contact will certainly continue!

Towards the end of the residency, there was a public presentation at which the three artists gave a brief talk about their careers and their work to date. Afterwards, there was the opportunity to visit the workshops, admire the textiles being created on site and talk to the artists. It was an extremely stimulating evening, during which it was once again possible to feel the unifying power of textiles!

We wish Khristina, Leonie and Katerina all the best for the future and look forward to seeing them again!