Open Studio

How does a shared artistic language emerge across different materials, media and lived experiences? In the Open Studio, artists and designers Vanessa Amoah Opoku and Joy Weinberger offer an insight into their collaborative practice through material fragments, weaving samples and process-based experiments developed for their multimedia installation Bricks and Cement Don’t Make a House.

Rooted in Opoku's family history, the work reflects on migration, diaspora and the fragile infrastructures of belonging. Combining smartphone LiDAR scans of unfinished houses in Ghana, archival cassette recordings, family photographs, woven textiles and sculptural elements, the installation traces the emotional, material and political dimensions of building—and imagining—a home. Digital point clouds are translated into woven structures, while analogue archives are transformed into tactile surfaces, creating new connections between memory, technology and materiality. The work explores how stories of migration, interrupted construction and intergenerational aspirations become inscribed in landscapes, objects and bodies, questioning inherited notions of home, return and permanence.

The Open Studio invites audiences behind the finished artwork, offering an opportunity to engage with the artists' collaborative process. Together, Opoku and Weinberger discuss material experimentation, the translation between digital and analogue practices, and the ways in which textile, technology and artistic collaboration become tools for telling stories that resist fixed narratives and singular histories.

This workshop is part of Transgressive Memory Festival, taking place on 12–13 September 2026. The workshop will take place in Atelier 1.