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.