Divinatory Textile Bundles with Sana López Abellán
A workshop transforming beeswax figures into personal amulets
Friday 6 November, 13:00 - 18:00
KB National Library, The Hague
Divinatory textile bundles are approached in this workshop as small, handmade objects for thinking forward, made by shaping intentions in beeswax and wrapping them in personal textiles so that bundling becomes a way of actively projecting a future, not waiting for one to be revealed.
This workshop explores the parallels between artists, curators, and diviners, drawing inspiration from African basket divination practices in which miniature figures are cast to interpret possible futures. Rather than waiting for outcomes to be revealed through divination, participants are invited to actively manifest their desired futures by creating the divinatory objects themselves.
We will carve objects we wish to identify with in beeswax, miniatures. Alluding to the Ex Voto European traditions as well as worldwide materializations of fate like African Basket divinations.
Participants will sculpt small figurative miniatures in beeswax, a material associated with transformation and ritual. These figures represent personal intentions, aspirations, or projected life paths. Once completed, they will be wrapped into textile bundles, transforming them into personal amulets that embody agency, and self-fulfilment.
From Nahua tlaquimilōlli and Maya tz'ite divination bundles to Tibetan knotted ritual cords, Japanese omamori amulets, and European folk-magic knot bundles, divinatory power is repeatedly imagined as something that must be wrapped, knotted, bound, and ritually handled in textile form in order to be activated and controlled. This workshop situates itself within this global cultural phenomenon, where textiles mediate relationships between the human and the divine.
Participants are invited to bring a small textile fragment from their personal history, which will be used to wrap the beeswax figures. Often associated with burial or ancestral rites, sacred bundles are here reimagined as bundles of projection.
YOU CAN SIGN UP FOR THE WORKSHOP HERE
What happens when the ordinary is wrapped? When a personal textile, a piece of beeswax, an everyday material is gathered, shaped and bound into a bundle? This project explores how the profane can take on a sacred meaning through the simple and ancient act of wrapping.
BUNDLES draws from different strands of my practice and research: a deep study of indigenous textiles in Ecuador, and a long fascination with the ways the divine appears across cultures, in the humblest of objects and acts. The bundle, found across traditions and geographies, is one of those acts.
Often, offerings, or collections of magical elements are carried or presented in textile. And yet, textile bundling is also a way of protecting the sacred, like in the practice of tightly swaddling young babies in carefully prescribed ways, to guard them from evil.
In this first part of the research, bundles are approached as small, handmade objects for thinking forward. Intentions are shaped in beeswax and wrapped in personal textiles, so that the act of bundling becomes a way of actively projecting a future — not waiting for one to be revealed. Think ex-votos revisited.
This artistic research will culminate in a workshop and gathering in The Hague, Netherlands, in fall 2025, where participants will be invited to make their own bundles, and in doing so, to hold their intentions in their hands.
