Nicole Weniger – Artist-in-Residence in Portugal: Exploring Textile as Shelter, Identity, and Waste
August 8, 2025

Nicole Weniger (*1987, Innsbruck) develops an artistic practice at the intersection of photography, installation, and performative gesture. Her work addresses questions of identity, belonging, and spatial orientation, often emerging from landscapes in ecological, political, or symbolic transformation. Her temporary interventions combine documentary precision with narrative openness.

Within the European project Magic Carpets, Nicole was selected for an Artist in Residence program in Guimarães, Portugal, as part of the thematic framework “CYCLES – Renewing Flows, a Landscape in Motion”. The program focused on the richness and continuous transformation of the textile territory of Guimarães and the Ave Valley. From 29 June to 31 July 2025, she worked alongside the artists Rio Drop (Sweden) and Ludgero Almeida (Portugal) under the curation of Cláudia Melo (assistance: Luísa Abreu and Ana Leandro). Together, they developed collaborative projects with local communities, promoting the integration, documentation, and appreciation of textile know-how, with a focus on sustainability, circular economy, and the revival of ancestral techniques.

Textiles appear in Weniger’s work as shells, traces, or remnants — culturally coded yet open to new interpretations. Her artistic journey has taken her from glaciers to the Dead Sea, from deserts to Guimarães, in northern Portugal — a city deeply tied to the textile industry. Earlier in the year, Weniger worked in the Atacama Desert in Chile, photographing the largest fast-fashion waste dumps in the world — mountains of unworn clothes, a cemetery of garments.

In Guimarães, she turned her attention to the hands of textile workers — observing how they touch the material, connect threads, cut fabrics, and control quality through direct contact. This intimate focus became a way to appreciate the tactile connection between the workers’ hands and the fabrics.

During her residency, Weniger worked with photographs taken at the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Guimarães community and within local textile factories. Collaborating with former factory workers, she explored their embodied knowledge: the gestures, grips, and work steps that defined their professions. She invited them to recall their favorite and least favorite tasks, creating a shared archive of body memories. These fragments of movement were re-composed into gestures — with readable and non-readable meanings — open for new layers of meaning and connection.

The residency in Guimarães was curated by Cláudia Melo, with assistance by Luísa Abreu and Ana Leandro.
Austrian curator / artist suggestion: Danijela Oberhofer Tonković, assistance: Brigitte Egger.

What a beautiful work!

Thank you, Nicole, for participating, and thanks to Ideas Emergentes / Contextile Biennial, under the direction of visionary Joaquim Pinheiro and the wonderful curation of Claudia Melo, for trusting us and inviting our artists to create and share their work in Portugal.

📸 Credits: Ivo Rainha and Joaquim Pinheiro

In Austria, Magic Carpets is led by a collaboration between Openspace Innsbruck (Wilten) and independent curator and cultural manager Danijela Oberhofer Tonković. Together, they foster opportunities for local artists and the wider cultural landscape — providing a platform for international exchange, experimentation, critical reflection, artistic production, and public presentation. The project is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme, with support from the City of Innsbruck, the State of Tyrol, and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture.