BlackFest continues its 2026 visual arts programme at Granby Winter Garden with a hands-on workshop led by artist Alena Kudera, exploring textiles, sustainability, identity and the stories carried by everyday materials.
Kudera’s practice is concerned with transformation. Discarded clothing, textiles and found objects can be taken apart, reworked and given new meaning, encouraging participants to think about the value we attach to materials and the assumptions we make about what is considered finished, useful or beautiful.
Clothing has a particular significance because it sits so close to the body. What we wear can communicate culture, gender, status, memory, belonging and personal identity before a word is spoken. By deconstructing and rebuilding textile materials, the workshop opens up questions about how identities are formed, altered and read by other people.
Sustainability is another important thread. Reusing materials challenges the culture of disposability while showing how creative practice can turn what might otherwise be treated as waste into something with renewed purpose. That process of reimagining materials can also become a metaphor for memory and cultural storytelling.
The workshop forms part of BlackFest’s wider visual arts programme in Liverpool 8. As a grassroots Black arts festival, BlackFest creates space for artists and communities to meet through making as well as performance, allowing participants to engage directly with creative processes rather than only encountering completed work in galleries.
For Black History Month, the workshop sits within a programme that understands culture broadly. Identity is carried through objects, clothing, family habits, style and the materials people keep or discard. Exploring those ideas through textiles can open conversations that are personal, environmental and social at the same time.
Taking place over three hours at Granby Winter Garden, the session offers an opportunity to experiment with material storytelling in a relaxed creative setting and to consider how something old, overlooked or discarded can be transformed into a new expression of value and identity.
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