Workshop on Hydro-rugging: Stitching Care Across Water Bodies

Date: 12.06.2026
Time: 17:00-19:00
Host: University of Bergen


> Event

This participatory workshop led by South African scholar Aaniyah Martin invites attendees into the practice of hydro-rugging - a collective, slow, and embodied method of stitching stories of water, memory, and care.

The places for the workshop are limited.
Please email Riikka (Riikka.prattes@uib.no) to register.

About the Workshop
Working with reclaimed materials such as fabric offcuts and beach plastic, participants are guided to create small textile pieces while reflecting on their own relationships with water, whether personal, ancestral, or imagined.

Hydro-rugging draws on feminist care ethics, Indigenous knowledge practices, and research-creation methodologies, positioning making as a form of thinking and healing. As individual pieces are created, they are brought into relation with one another, forming a collective “Mother Hydro-rug” that holds diverse narratives and experiences.

The workshop offers a space for listening, storytelling, and quiet making, foregrounding care as both a personal and collective practice that extends across human and more-than-human worlds.


About Aaniyah Martin
Aaniyah Martin is a South African scholar, artist, and environmental practitioner working at the intersections of water, care, and social justice. With over two decades of experience in conservation, her work has shifted toward feminist, posthumanist, and research-creation approaches that centre relational ontologies and embodied ways of knowing.

Her doctoral research, completed at Rhodes University, explores reparative pedagogies for the hydrocommons through practices such as strandlooping and hydro-rugging. Aaniyah’s work is rooted in the context of Camissa (Cape Town) and engages deeply with the legacies of apartheid, foregrounding Black and Brown experiences of environmental exclusion and reconnection. She works across disciplines and her recent collaboration with artist Amy Rusch brings archaeology and deep time into dialogue with water, care, and environmental memory.

She is the founder of The Beach Co-op, a community initiative focused on ocean stewardship and creative environmental engagement, and serves on the faculty for Homeward Bound Projects, a global leadership initiative supporting women in STEMM.

---

This event is free and open to all.

---