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Two articles in TxP [Textiel Plus]

November 2025

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Not one, but two articles about

my work

in the latest

txP!​

 

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click to read more

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Glue Design Route

Exhibition and public weaving session, 18 - 21 september 2025

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September 18 to 21, this weekend marked the 6th edition of Glue Design Route, for which I was selected to showcase my work at De Waag in Amsterdam, home to a textile fab lab and an innovative education program focused on experiment, creativity, and technology. It was a pleasure to show four of my collectively woven works in such a historical place in the city center. This time, I included live weaving, preparing small tutorials on how to weave around a book. I laid out examples and threads, inviting visitors to pick them up and weave a few lines themselves. Many were happy to take a tutorial home, finally able to try weaving on a small scale without needing to buy a loom that would take up space in their small Amsterdam apartments.

Art Residency in Skopje

Collaborative research 

In August 2025, I spent a month at the Brashnar art residency in Skopje, North Macedonia, together with my partner, musician Andrius Dereviancenko, with whom I collaborated during this time. While he had spent recent years immersed in live electronics, I explored the connection between weaving and singing. Following each other's discoveries sparked curiosity about how we might combine our work, and this residency marked our first dedicated time experimenting together. It was more technical research than a finished project, still more of a starting point than something with a clear context or concept. We discovered ways to connect sound to materials through movement, and realized that in the future, we'd like to work with more established weaving designs, or even experiment with a computer programmed loom.

I also created a work inspired by Skopje, a city where an eclectic mix of styles and histories converge. Ottoman influences remain visible in its many mosques and in traditional tapestries with kelim patterns, alongside the bold Brutalist architecture of the Yugoslav era, modern constructions, and the Baroque style facades and statues imposed in 2014 by a new right wing government, despite North Macedonia never having experienced a Baroque period due to Ottoman rule at the time. While none of these architectural styles feel particularly organic on their own, the way they coexist, reflecting the city's diverse communities of different religions and cultures, does. Here, harmony is found not in uniformity but in coexistence, with tensions rooted more in politics (perhaps tangible in the black warp) than in daily social life.

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Lola's Beasts

Commission in co-creation

April - July 2025. For artspace Lolalieven, artist Müge Yılmaz and I are creating a tapestry and wooden sculptures together with local residents and visitors. In artistic workshops, participants are invited to imagine animals from the past, future, and those they wish to protect, painting their visions with earth pigments — one of humanity’s oldest materials. These canvases will be combined into a large patchwork like  tapestry, while some of the imagined creatures will be transformed into wooden sculptures, also painted with earth pigments in collective workshops.

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A Tulip Carpet (part 2) 

A pilot in co-creation 

May 2025. The tulip carpet is blossoming! Well, mostly. It was a very dry and therefore challenging spring for the tulip field that is collectively designed and planted by residents of Osdorp, together with organisation The Beach (see more photo's our shared design process) and with guidance of artist Müge Yılmaz and myself. This was the garden's most promising moment, which was naturally celebrated by its creators! 

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Collective Weaving

@Plein 40-45 Amsterdam, 5 may 2025
Photography: Marc Roodhart

Expo & public weaving session
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@Loods 6, 28 - 30 march 2025
Photography by Olga Ganzha

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Expo

by Agathe Plouzennec & by Rosa Smits 
@Elo Food Based
dec 2024 - march 2025 

Collaboration

This design was created by artist Deniz Eroglu, commissioned by a Danish government building. I had the pleasure of guiding Deniz through the realisation of the tapestry in an apprenticeship—a meaningful continuation of our connection, which began during the COVID-19 pandemic when he first approached me to learn weaving.

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Expo & walk-in workshop 
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@ Pleinkamer (The  Bookstore Project) & Van Eesteren Museum
Curation: Rosa Smits
Photography: Andrej Tchernikov

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With guidance of Dóra Halas & Rosa Smits
@Pleinkamer, 19 November 2024

Workshop 

Haak & Maak x Weaving Voices

Forty women never to forget

Sept 2024 - March 2025. Traveling exhibition about the history of the women's movement of Turkish and Moroccan women in the Netherlands, by Stichting Sprekende Geschiedenis. The openings in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and Best included alongside of the exhibition a storytelling game, guided by Saskia Moerbeek; and the weaving of everyone's story in a collective artwork, guided by Rosa Smits.

 

Expo & collective weaving
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A Tulip Carpet (part 1)

Sustainable co-creation

Nov. 2024. Workplace The Beach set out to built their own 'Keukenhof' tulip fields with local residents. Artists Müge Yilmaz and Rosa Smits lead a workshop in designing a 'tulip carpet', after which they combined the drawings to one final design, that was also the blueprint of the tulip planting, which followed with help of local residents. Now it is time to wait till the tulips will blossom, which will happen in the early spring of 2025! 

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18 & 20 september 2024. The public weaving of two sauna mats from strips of old clothes for Warm Hearts Sauna (a floating community sauna) took place at West Beach Filmfestival. Many children and adults sat behind a loom for their first time to weave a few lines. For Rosa it was the first time to include an 8 shaft loom in the co-creating.

 

Weaving a saunamat 

Collective Weaving
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Expo


Through the language of carpets and symbolism,  Müge Yilmaz & Rosa Smits engage with the essence of female power. 
 

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Expo


@Van Eesteren Museum, 20 june - 14 july 2024
Curation: Rosa van Rumpert
Photography: Almicheal Fraay

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An introduction to the very diverse group of artists from Amsterdam New-West. Check out the online version here

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Expo

@Loods 6, with IJ Kunst Collectief
29 - 31 march 2024
Photography: Olga Ganzha

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Contact

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inforosasmits@gmail.com

00 31 (0)6 1311 0839

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Disclaimer. If you believe any materials has been included improperly on this website, please contact Rosa Smits. 

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