LISBON.- At the Centro Agroecológico do Madeiral, on the São Vicente Island, Cabo Verde, the three-year project “Insular Textile Matrix – Managing community sovereignty and or designing new futures” was officially presented.


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Rooted in the legacy of the artistic collective Neve Insular, the initiative seeks to revitalise the cotton cycle and the production of Pano d’Obra—two key elements of the archipelago’s textile heritage.


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This occasion marked the official launch of a new stage of creation where matter (the earth, cotton, and hands) gives shape to the imagined, inaugurating a new identity deeply rooted in the commitment to the Madeiral and Calhau community and the fate of the islands' textile heritage. Thus, the first gestures of a collective future that the project aims to build have been announced.

Coordinated by Ângelo Lopes, architect on Oficina de Utopias and emerging from the long-term practice of Neve Insular—co-founded by artists and researchers Rita Rainho and Vanessa Monteiro—Insular Textile Matrix articulates agroforestry, educational and artistic practices to affirm a sovereignty in textile art and design grounded in Cabo Verde’s artisanal identity.

Through the recovery of the agroecological cotton cycle and a reinterpretation of Pano d’Obra—one of the archipelago's most expressive cultural artefacts—the project values ancestral know-how while strengthening the communities of the Madeiral and Calhau valley (São Vicente), imagining new narratives for the Pan-Atlantic geography (Africa–America—Europe).

Approaching contemporary textiles as a regenerative cultural language, the project also positions itself as a critical practice of resistance and transformation. Beyond this conceptual foundation and its proposed three-year duration (2025–2027), Insular Textile Matrix will implement a knowledge-sharing programme structured through a strategic and collaborative action plan. The programme includes community and business management workshops, communication strategies, and distribution and sales channels; exchange with contemporary Senegalese textile practices; production of textile works; a sequence of workshops—from spinning and indigo dyeing to Pano d’Obra weaving—culminating in a major exhibition; a short film (from research to dissemination); and three publications: a Pano d’Obra weaving manual, a book for young audiences, and an academic-artistic volume, along with an international seminar.

This strategy responds to the progressive abandonment of cotton-related agricultural and artisanal practices, accelerated by colonial cultural suppression policies, which have brought this heritage close to extinction. With historical roots dating back to the 16th century, cotton in Cabo Verde was once integrated into the Atlantic slave-trade economy. As a drought-tolerant, rain-fed crop, the cotton plant played a central economic, symbolic, and material role across the islands until its cultivation was halted. In response, Neve Insular reinscribes the cotton cycle into a transdisciplinary practice that interweaves agroecological, educational, and artistic dimensions, offering a vision of ecological and cultural resistance in a region severely affected by climate change, desertification, and rural exodus, particularly among women.

As a promoting entity, Oficina de Utopias ensures the continuity of this transformative process by providing technical, methodological, and institutional resources to consolidate and internationalise an experience that asserts itself as a poetic act of symbolic and material re-foundation of Cape Verdean territory.

Bridging ancestral knowledge and contemporary challenges while expanding the relationship between the rural and the urban, and between Cabo Verde and the world, is at the heart of what Insular Textile Matrix sets out to do.