On Saturday November 22 we will host the talk, Shared Threads: On Childhood, Making, and Imagination, by fashion designer and social scientist Lucia Cuba in conversation with visual and performance artist Mercedes Azpilicueta and Warehouse member Elisa van Joolen.

Shared Threads: On Childhood, Making, and Imagination

Saturday 22 November

Walk in: 16.30

Talk: 17.00 - 18.00

Artists Lucia Cuba, Mercedes Azpilicueta, and Elisa van Joolen come together to reflect on how their practices intersect through collaborations with children — as participants, co-creators, and thinkers. Working across art, textiles, and fashion, they explore how play, material experimentation, and storytelling can open spaces for shared authorship, learning, and imagination.

Through Elisa’s investigations of everyday clothing, Mercedes’ performative and language-based approaches, and Lucía’s participatory fashion research centering children’s civic and creative agency, the conversation examines how working alongside children reshapes understandings of care, pedagogy, and power.

The event will also highlight recent projects by the artists: Azpilicueta’s CaccHho CucchhA (commissioned by de Appel, Amsterdam), an exhibition activated through play structures, sound-making wearables, and collaborative tapestries; van Joolen’s PORTAL 004 and Our Rags Magazine, where children reimagine clothing to question value and belonging; and Cuba’s Acts of Wearing, which explores children’s acts of dressing and making as civic, creative, and transformative practices.

Together, the artists invite the public to consider how intergenerational collaboration and imagination can transform art and design into acts of social connection, learning, and collective transformation.

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Mercedes Azpilicueta is an artist, performer, writer and educator from Buenos Aires, living and working in Amsterdam. Her interdisciplinary and collaborative work combines dissident voices, regenerative practices and materials, speculative fiction and radical imagination.

Lucia Cuba is a Peruvian designer, textile artist, and scholar based in New York. Her work explores the intersections of fashion, politics, and social justice, treating clothing as a medium for dialogue, resistance, and collective imagination.

Elisa van Joolen is an artist, designer and educator based in Amsterdam. In her work she exposes relational aspects of clothing and subvert processes of value production. Her projects often reflect specific social contexts and emphasise collaboration and participation.