Project 47
Weaving Waters
Roshni Kavate, Violeta Ortega Navarrete, Gian Padilla Suarez, and Jahel Guerra Roa
October 10th - November 7th, opening reception on Friday, October 10th from 19h
Roshni Kavate, Violeta Ortega Navarrete, Gian Padilla Suarez, and Jahel Guerra Roa are established practitioners in their respective mediums of textiles, performance, and photography. For Weaving Waters, they have chosen to dissolve the boundaries of individual practice, creating a collaborative textile altar installation that functions as living architecture—a spatial practice designed for reconnection with the bodies of water that flow within and around us.
The artists will construct an installation that weaves together ancestral mythologies, indigenous cosmovisions, and decolonial perspectives into a unified ritual space. While the mediums appear diverse—textiles dyed with natural pigments, participatory performances, photographic portraiture, and woven sculptures—there is a profound underlying current that reflects our shared relationship to water as life force and endangered territory.
For this collective, this exhibition will represent a shared mourning for what has been lost—and a radical reimagining of what might be restored. They illuminate that our relationship to water, like our understanding of ecology, is not fixed but constructed. As Donna Haraway suggests through her concept of "naturecultures," that relationship is continually reshapeable through conscious practice and collective engagement.
Central to the work is activating community connection in a space of confluence and merging. Discovery and relationship-building will unfold organically through listening sessions, communal dinners, and public readings. Drawing from Torkwase Dyson's understanding of how spatial architectures can hold both refuge and resistance, the artists will work alongside community members to create "altar architecture"—structures that function as sites of gathering and contemplation, spaces where the urgency of ecological care meets the intimacy of personal transformation.
What may at first seem to be an intimate exploration of our emotional water bodies expands to encompass the collective trauma of ecological destruction and colonial extraction. The altar architecture they will create will serve not as a monument but as a portal: a threshold space where mourning and regeneration can coexist, where listening becomes a form of ecological practice.
Memory will play a pivotal role in the installation, evoking relationships to water that colonization and capitalism have severed. The artists draw upon ancestral knowledge systems that understood water as formless, genderless, and borderless—qualities that existed before the commodification of natural resources.
By presenting an installation that moves beyond individual artistic security, the collective actively engages in cultural reweaving. In collaboratively dismantling the extractive relationships they have inherited, they affirm a conscious commitment to regenerative practice.
Weaving Waters becomes both question and answer—an invitation to remember that we are, fundamentally, bodies of water learning to care for bodies of water, through the radical acts of listening, sharing, and gathering together.
Roshni Kavate is a multidisciplinary artist emerging from a lineage of South Indian artisanal weavers whose practice intricately weaves investigations of memory, ecology, and diaspora. Trained initially as a palliative care nurse, Kavate's work explores the profound cartographies of grief, belonging and the body through textile, printmaking, and video installations and immersive research, drawing from ancestral technologies of oral and gestural memory.
Her artistic methodology—which she terms "nostalgic futurism"—reimagines postcolonial narratives through whimsical and contemplative explorations of belonging, and care. In a world of digital transience, Roshni relishes the repetitive movement of the hand, stamping, stirring, dyeing, sealing, mark making, molding, and awakening the corporeal memory.
Roshni is also part of the Barcelona based collective Mango and Okra, the collective engages in radical inquiry and reimagination of diasporic journeys through culinary storytelling and documenting forgotten realities and creating post-colonial futures. It's a collaboration between Agnes Essonti Luque, Lizette Nin and Roshni Kavate.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including notable presentations at Santa Monica, MACBA Cuina and Bar Project in Barcelona, the Off Dakar Biennial, and spaces across Los Angeles and San Francisco. She recently completed a two month residency and show, Topologies of Resistance: Memory, Body, Place at Šopa Gallery in Slovakia. She is a studio artist at Tangent Projects studios in Barcelona
Jahel Guerra Roa is a visual artist and photographer from Abya Yala, currently based in Barcelona after multiple migrations. Her work explores themes of displacement, identity, and belonging through intimate and collective landscapes — both human and more-than-human — guided by intuition, sensibility, and decolonial feminist perspectives.
Her work has been published internationally, and exhibited in cities such as Barcelona, Tarragona, Oaxaca, London, Madrid, Paris, and Sydney.
She is part of the collective Foto-Féminas, and Las Migras de Abya Yala with which she promoted artistic and cultural management actions in Barcelona in spaces such as the CCCB, Ca La Dona, the LGBTQ Center and in the public space.
Born in Mexico City, Violeta Ortega Navarrete’s 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 self-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 have more ethical relations with the environment and with others.
Violeta studied Textile Design at the National Institute of Fine Arts, and Hispanic Literature at the National University of Mexico. Now she is based in Athens, Greece. In 2020, she co-founded Islera, an independent space for artistic experimentation and cultural cooperation located in Mexico City.
Gian Padilla Suárez is a Barcelona based artist with Honduran roots, and a designer known for her innovative approach to textiles and fashion.
Her handwoven tapestries incorporate geometric abstraction, organic forms, and rich earth tones, evoking a sense of movement, rhythm and emotional storytelling. Drawing from personal experiences and cultural heritage, her pieces reflect both structural precision and raw spontaneity.
With a background in fashion from the Instituto Europeo di Design in Barcelona, she has showcased her work internationally. Based in Barcelona, she co-owns Nouroom and operates Studio M41, fostering creativity and cross-cultural dialogue through art and design.