Healing, stitch by stitch texTALES project

How a European collaborative fashion project becomes a space for expression, connection, and shared experience.

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Not everything that is made is visible at first. Some things take shape quietly, in repetition, in shared time, in the small gestures that pass between people working side by side.

texTALES is a collaborative project that brings together ethical fashion and human stories across Europe. Its travelling exhibition, Handle with Care, presents a collection of garments created through this process. But focusing only on what is displayed during this exhibition, would overlook what actually holds it together.

This reflection does not begin with the clothes and looks themselves, but with the people behind them. With the process. With what happens in the space between making and sharing.

Because for many of those who participated, texTALES became something more than a project. It became a space of expression, of connection, and, in ways that are not always immediately visible, a form of therapy.

Creating together is powerful. When you make something as a group, the energy is different. You feel something beautiful that is difficult to describe.

-Elena

Within the working spaces of texTALES, the process begins with materials. Fabrics that already carry a past. Pieces that have been used, discarded, or left behind. Nothing starts from nothing.

As the process unfolds, attention shifts from outcome to action. Measuring, cutting, stitching; gestures repeated over time. Not as routine, but as a way of staying present. Of focusing on something that can be held, adjusted, continued.

Clothes created from recycled materials reflect life itself — a continuous process of change, transformation and becoming.

-Gül

There is no requirement to share, yet stories often surface. Through repetition, through presence, through the act of making something tangible. In this way, the workshops begin to hold space for more than skill-building. They become environments where experience can be expressed without needing to be explained all at once.

What is often described as therapy does not always arrive in expected forms. It is not always structured, nor verbal, nor does it require sitting across from Freud’s ghost on a very expensive chair.

Not everyone has access to that version of care.

Here, it takes place through making. Through the quiet consistency of working with one’s hands. Through being part of a group without the pressure to perform or explain. For me, this journey became a form of therapy. It helped me understand myself better and discover new parts of who I am.

-Gül

In this context, creation becomes a way to process. Not by revisiting everything at once, but by allowing meaning to settle gradually. To move at its own pace. To exist without being fully resolved.

This does not replace professional support, nor does it attempt to. But it opens a different kind of space; one where presence, collaboration, and material engagement allow something internal to shift, even subtly.

When these processes take form as garments, something of that experience remains embedded within them. Not visibly, not in a way that can be immediately explained, but in the way they are constructed, carried, and presented.The exhibition Handle with Care brings these pieces into public view. In TexTales, each of us worked on different parts of the garment. When I see my part in the final piece, I feel proud to have contributed.  

 -Liubov

To encounter the collection is not only to observe fashion, but to come into contact with something more layered. Each piece holds decisions, adjustments, exchanges. Moments that are no longer present, yet not entirely gone.

In this way, the exhibition becomes an extension of the process itself. An invitation to look more closely. To consider what remains, and what is often left unseen.

As Handle with Care arrives in Greece, the collection finds a new context. The exhibition will take place at Pano Spiti, opening its doors to the public for a limited number of days.

In the workshop we become part of something bigger. People in different cities work on the same pieces, each person contributing something. In the end, we all become part of one shared creation.

I hope visitors leave with the feeling that everyone can contribute to something. Even a small idea or action can create change.

- Masha

Visitors are invited to view the garments, but especially to spend time with them. To move through the space at their own pace, and to engage with the stories they carry.

For the past year and a half, texTALES has been unfolding across different cities, spaces, and collaborations, in close partnership with organisations such as War Childhood Museum, Espero Atelier, and Farsi Prossimo ODV. What will be presented in Athens is only a fragment of that journey; the visible part of a much longer process.

Behind each piece lies time, coordination, learning, and continuous exchange between partners, participants, and communities.

We are excited to finally bring this work to Greece and to open it to the public.

This is an invitation to step into that process, to experience it up close, and to spend time with what has been created.

3 -day Event Programme

2 April | Opening Night

18:00–23:00 Fashion exhibition Open

19:00 Film screening

21:00 Music performance

3 April

12:00–23:00 Fashion exhibition

19:00 Film screening

4 April

12:00–23:00 Fashion exhibition

19:00 Film screening

Free entrance.

Location: To pano spiti Leof. Alexandras 37, Athens