Shanzhai Lyric, “Incomplete Poem (hedge)”, for the group show “The Weight of Words”, Henry Moore Foundation, UK, 2023

Shanzhai Lyric is a poetic inquiry and archive run by artists Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky, focusing on radical logistics and linguistics through the prism of technological aberration and nonofficial cultures.

The project takes inspiration from the experimental English of shanzhai t-shirts made in China and proliferating across the globe to examine how the language of counterfeit uses mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies. Through an ever-growing archive of poetry-garments, Shanzhai Lyric explores the potential of mis-translation and nonsense as utopian world-making (breaking) and has previously taken the form of poetry-lecture, essay, and installation.

During their week-long residency at Lottozero, Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky explored the local concept of “rossino,” connecting it to their ongoing research on rag recycling and regeneration across Prato, New York, and the English tradition of “shoddy.”

We’re thrilled to announce that Lottozero is once again hosting a young entrepreneur through the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs Programme!

Lottozero,  continues its commitment to supporting new creative talent in textiles, fashion, and design.

This year, we’ve decided to take a more focused approach. In order for the Erasmus programme to be truly successful, we believe it’s essential to be clear about what kind of experience we can offer and what kind of entrepreneur can make the most of it. That’s why we’ve created a specific profile for the candidate we’d love to host: someone hands-on, curious, and deeply passionate about textiles, materials, and design processes, who’s ready to learn the entrepreneurial side of running a creative lab.

The selected participant will work closely with our Lab Manager inside the Lottozero Textile Lab, engaging daily with machinery, materials, and production workflows, while gaining first-hand insight into creative research, collaboration, and studio management.

Please note: this opportunity is open to participants who are eligible for the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs programme. Please check eligibility here: erasmus-entrepreneurs.eu/page.php?cid=2

If this sounds like you, please fill out this Google Form.

 This form is designed to help us get to know you better — your background, motivation, and interest in joining Lottozero. The information you share will help us understand whether your profile aligns with the kind of experience we can offer in our textile laboratory and creative community. Please note that the form can be submitted until the 22nd of November.

Please note that the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs funding and eligibility process is handled separately by the program’s national contact points in each country. Each applicant should check their own eligibility and apply for funding through their local organization.

Nadia Tamanini, Esercizi di rinnovata scrittura - imparaticcio #0: potenza palindroma, 2023, cross-stitch on Aida fabric, mirrors, 18X18X18 cm

Nadia Tamanini (b. 1987, Trento) is a multidisciplinary artist working across visual poetry, installation, and performance. Through her practice, words, images, and materials become tools for dialogue — between individuals and communities, adulthood and childhood.
She explores language as material, transforming words into images, sounds, and gestures in dialogue with space, where text takes on tangible, sculptural form shaped by her belief in relation, intersection, and biodiversity.

During her month-long residency at Lottozero (till the end of October), she will continue her research on visual poetry, experimenting with new textile techniques such as jacquard weaving, digital embroidery, and knitwear.

Her work, often site-specific, has been presented in Italy since 2011 in solo and group exhibitions, festivals, illustrated books and poetry publications, and especially within curatorial projects for museums, community spaces, and private collections.

For the magazine Arte Trentina, she is the author of original poems for the poetry column L’occhio attraverso (“The Eye Through”). Her work is part of the permanent collection of MUSEION – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano Bozen.

Next Friday marks the final day to experience Liselore Frowijn’s exhibition Every Month I Weave at Lottozero.

A project we hold very close to our hearts, Every Month I Weave explores the history and politics of textile labor, the female body, and invisible work — themes deeply intertwined with the city of Prato and its rich textile heritage. 
Inspired by the historical figure of Margherita Datini, the exhibition weaves together archival research, contemporary textile practice, and feminist reflection, offering a poetic and critical lens on the ways women’s labor has been essential yet often erased from social and economic narratives.

Finissage: Friday, October 24th, 18:00 – 20:30 at Lottozero

“Stitching the Poetry” (2022–ongoing) is a communal embroidery workshop initiated by the artist duo Handwork — Dileta Deikė and Jelena Škulis.

First conceived in the spring of 2022, as war broke out in Ukraine, the project invited the local community in Vilnius to embroider a poem by Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk—written amidst the devastation of Hostomel, Bucha, Irpin, Kharkiv, and Mariupol—onto a hand-woven linen fabric once hidden underground during World War II.
This act of stitching became both a protest and a healing ritual, using thread and words as weapons of truth and resilience.

The linen now carries the voices of poets across generations. In this workshop, participants are invited to continue this living work by embroidering war-time poetry by Iryna Starovoyt and the late Viktorija Amelina, who was tragically killed in Kramatorsk.

No prior experience in embroidery is required. All materials will be provided.
The workshop will be held in English.

Number of participants: max. 15
Duration: 17:00 – 18:30
Free registration via Eventbrite
Via Arno, 10 Prato

The workshop is part of the Cultura Lituana in Italia 2025–2026 program.
The Cultura Lituana in Italia 2025–2026 program is implemented by the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in the Italian Republic.

Susanne Khalil Yusef, detail of Café Disorient-We Want To Live, 2021, Valkhof Museum, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Photo by Flip Franssen.

This year, the British Textile Biennial (BTB) invited Textile Culture Net (TCN) to co-curate and develop a special online exhibition that expands the Biennial’s 2025 theme, of industrial production, synthetic cloth over the past century, the damage it has wrought, and what we can recover from alternative traditions through a global perspective.

Next week, join two free online panel discussions moderated by Laurie Peake, BTB’s Artistic Director, in which artists and experts expand on these themes and how textiles carry the traces of labour, industry, and nature:

Monday 20 October
Thursday 23 October

Attendance is free (limited seats), for more detailled information on the entire BTB program check out their Eventbrite

Meanwhile, the British Textile Biennial 2025 runs from 2 October to 2 November across East Lancashire, UK, with exhibitions, installations, talks, and events in historic textile venues.

We’re thrilled to announce our first participation in Dutch Design Week 2025, taking part in two projects that reflect our ongoing commitment to sustainable innovation and creative collaboration.

At Klokgebouw, Strijp-S, Booth B10 we present Circular Wool – Robotufted Carpet, developed with Margaux Minodier and Casalis. The project transforms undervalued wool waste — the so-called raw wool from cheese and meat farming — into refined textile surfaces through an innovative combination of material research and robotic tufting, proposing a new circular model for interior textiles where craft and technology meet.

At the same time, we join New Order of Fashion’s program Wool: (Re)discovered at the NOOF Lab, an inspiring week of exhibitions, talks, and workshops exploring the regenerative potential of wool. On Saturday 25 October, Lottozero will contribute with a talk, Understanding Talent Development & Creative Hub Infrastructure, and a workshop, Made in Prato: A Textile Literacy Workshop for Designers, sharing our experience from Prato’s circular textile district.

We’re proud to be in such amazing company and extend our thanks to New Order of Fashion for the invitation and the inspiring collaboration.

Dutch Design Week runs from 18 to 26 October 2025 in Eindhoven.

For the fifth edition of BAW – Bolzano Art Weeks, Lottozero presents What Lies Behind the Boundaries of a Shadow?, a new site-specific installation by Barbara Prenka, curated by Lottozero and shown inside the former bar of Bolzano’s Central Station.

Developed during the artist’s residency at Lottozero (July–September 2025), the project extends Prenka’s ongoing exploration of the blanket as a sculptural and symbolic object. Recreated from scratch as a hybrid between painting and soft sculpture, the blanket becomes both surface and volume—an image of care and protection, yet also of absence and displacement. Suspended from the ceiling and illuminated by a single spotlight, the textile form hovers in darkness, transforming the empty room overlooking platform one into an intimate, contemplative space.

The installation is accompanied by a sound piece by Alessandra Novaga, which interacts with the constant rhythm of trains and travelers passing by. Embroidered words emerge as tactile signs, where language turns into texture and text becomes body.

What Lies Behind the Boundaries of a Shadow? marks the beginning of an extended collaboration between Lottozero and Barbara Prenka. A new version of the project will be presented at the Lottozero Kunsthalle in 2026 as part of the exhibition program Soft Sculpture, dedicated to contemporary approaches to sculpture through textile materials.

Presentation: 08.10 h. 17.00
Opening times: 03.10-11.10 Mo-Sa: 15.00-19.00

Ex-Restaurant Bolzano train Station, Piazza della Stazione 1
Supported by the Province of South Tyrol – Department of Culture

This Saturday, we’re opening the doors of our textile lab for a full afternoon of discovery, creativity, and connection. It's one of our favorite moments of the year — a chance to share what we’ve been working on, welcome new faces, and celebrate the vibrant community that grows around textile art and design.

Come wander through our space, chat with the people who bring it to life, and get a closer look at the tools, materials, and ideas that shape our practice. From ongoing research and experiments to personal projects and collaborative processes, you'll get an inside view of what happens at Lottozero every day.

Whether you're familiar with Lottozero or discovering it for the first time, we’d love to welcome you in. Come by, say hi, and get inspired.

Free Entry

14.00-20.00

Via Arno, 10 Prato

From Saturday September 6th to Monday September 8th you can meet us at Who’s Next , where Lottozero Studio is featured in the Creative Hub section, dedicated to services and innovation and curated by

For this occasion we‘ll showcase a broad spectrum of our work: textile developments made for our consultancy clients, selected products from the Prato textile district, and a collection of unique samples created in the Lottozero lab by international designers and artists. The presentation will highlight the diversity of approaches and the innovative use of materials that guide our practice and our collaborations.

We are looking forward to sharing our research and projects in Paris, and to opening up new conversations with brands, designers, and makers interested in textile experimentation. If you would like to learn more about our services and discover our latest work, come and meet us there!

We are thrilled to announce that in one month we will join BAW - Bolzano Art Weeks, for the fifth time in a raw, as a partner of the initiative. This year we will present “What Lies Behind the Boundaries of a Shadow?”, a new project by Barbara Prenka, developed during her residency at Lottozero, which is currently still going on.

Within the frame of this year theme - Remapping LAND/marks - Barbara Prenka’s site specific installation inhabit an empty area of the Bolazo train station with her hand sewn and embroidered blankets: hybrid objects between painting and soft sculpture, symbols of care and witnesses to conflict and social marginalisation. Through the act of covering and shaping, the blankets reinterpret space and make emptiness tangible, reactivating the memory of places.

Presentation: 08.10 h. 17.00
Opening times: 03.10-11.10 Mo-Sa: 15.00-19.00
Ex-Restaurant Bolzano train Station, Piazza della Stazione 1

Zoey Yang is a London-based Canadian-Chinese artist. Primarily working with sculptures and drawings, her works are presented as either records of actions or objects to be performed with, a process of reimagining female lived experiences in alternative narratives. Her work navigates the tension of metaphorical division between the inside and the outside (of bodies, spaces, containments, and others), troubling the seemingly definitive duality of appearances and expectations. Current focus introspects the origins of guilt and its internal relation to external morality prescriptions, traversing between religious teachings and moral guidelines implemented in largely secular societies.

Yang is a current MFA candidate at Goldsmiths University and holds a BASc in Cognitive Science and Art History from McGill University. 

Zoey Yang, Fledging, durational performance. Fledging activates the second stage of Nestling, 2024, mild steel, hand-dyed cotton and wool yarn, hand-dyed silk, chicken wire.

Lottozero invites applications from independent fashion brands for a one-week residency in the heart of Italy’s Prato fashion and textile district; a district famous for offering all phases of fashion production.

The goal is to introduce brands to the sourcing, production, and circular innovation opportunities available within the Prato textile district—Europe’s leading hub for recycled materials, textile development, and manufacturing.

The residency offers full access to Lottozero’s creative hub, textile lab, and shared studios, along with a curated introduction to the district’s extensive network of textile suppliers, manufacturers, and circular production resources. This is an opportunity to experience firsthand what it means to design and produce locally—within one of Europe’s most advanced textile ecosystems.

What’s Included: 

• One-week stay in the Lottozero residency apartment (single or duo occupancy)

• Full access to our Textile Lab, Creative Hub, and shared workspaces

• Guided tours of the Prato textile district, including:

• Visits to suppliers of stock fabrics, regenerated, recycled, and natural fibers

• Meetings with local producers and manufacturers

• Textile archives and circular economy hubs

• Tailored introductions to sourcing and production partners based on your brand’s needs

Who Should Apply:

We welcome applications from independent fashion brands that:

• Have an established identity and collection(s) in development or production

• Are interested in sourcing materials and producing garments locally

• Want to explore how working in Prato can support a more sustainable, flexible, and traceable supply chain

About the Residency:

The selected brand will spend one focused week at Lottozero, using our infrastructure and network to explore what the Prato district can offer their creative and production process. The residency also serves as a way to promote the opportunities available to brands working through Lottozero and with local partners.

How to Apply:

To apply, fill out the application form with:

• A short description of your brand and current work (max 300 words)

• A website or social media link

• A statement explaining what you hope to research, source, or develop during your residency in Prato

Application deadline: August 31st
Residency dates: September 29th to October 5th
Travel and meals are not included.

Melanie Read at the RE-DESIGNING WASTE: Pocket Politics Workshop, presented as part of Melbourne Fashion Festival’s Independent Programme

Melanie Read is an Australian fashion practitioner whose research-driven practice combines speculative design, sustainable systems, and experimental textile development. Her work explores how materials and making processes can shape alternative futures—social, ecological, and industrial—through a deep engagement with local contexts and global challenges.

Melanie Read holds a Honours degree of Fashion (Design) from RMIT University in Melbourne, where she supports the Fashion Design program as a technical assistant in garment construction and machine training.
She is the founder of Future Archive, is a Naarm/Melbourne based Fashion practice tackling textile waste issues through research led design.

For the whole month of July 2025, Melanie Read is in residence at Lottozero, where she continues working on her long-term project Future Archive. During her time in Prato, Read will investigate the city’s historic textile industry with a particular focus on the recycled wool supply chain, one of the oldest and most advanced circular economies in the world.

Engaging directly with local material flows, and industrial processes, and working in the Lottozero lab, Read will explore how design can act as a critical tool to map, question, and reimagine the systems that underpin textile production. Her process will include on-site research, sampling, and material prototyping using reclaimed and regenerated fibers sourced from within the Prato district and beyond.

Barbara Prenka explores themes of identity—both individual and collective—and migration. For years, the blanket has been at the core of her artistic research: a symbol of care and protection, a constant presence in our lives, but also a silent witness to conflict and social marginality.

Between July and September 2025, Barbara Prenka is in residence at Lottozero, where she further investigates the transformation of the blanket, recreated from scratch as a plastic object between painting and sculpture, into a spatial, three-dimensional form.
Her process involves experimenting with digital embroidery and layering new narrative elements onto the work.

The outcome of the residency will be a new series of textile sculptures, which will premiere during the Bolzano Art Weeks (BAW) in October 2025, and will later be exhibited at the Lottozero Kunsthalle as the third chapter of our Soft Sculpture biennial exhibitions program.

Born in 1990 in Gjakova, Kosovo, Barbara Prenka holds both a BA and MA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. She currently lives and works between Berlin, Bolzano, and Venice.
Her recent solo exhibitions include Covers, curated by Zef Paci at Arthouse Shkodër (2025) and at the Ministry of Culture Gallery in Prishtina (2024); What time is it between my fingers? at A plus A Gallery, Venice (2025); and Dita e re at the Kosovo Documentation Center in Prishtina (2023).

Prenka’s residency is part of our Soft Sculpture program, supported by Toscanaincontemporanea 2025 and the Province of South Tyrol, Department of Culture.

Barbara Prenka, Do You Recognize the Corner next to the Window?, 2024, digitally printed fabric, sewn and padded with wadding and canvas, series of 7 pieces, 190 x 140 cm. Courtesy the artist.

We’re excited to take part in the 3rd edition of Aprto – Aperture del contemporaneo a Prato, a summer night where seven spaces across the city open their doors for exhibitions, performances, and installations.
“Aprto” is an anagram of “Prato” — a twisted, hard-to-pronounce word that reflects the unconventional ways these spaces engage with the local territory.

Come visit us for a special opening of “Every Month I Weave”, a solo exhibition by Liselore Frowijn @studiofrowijn (5 pm - 11 pm).
Through a series of textile sculptures and jacquard tapestries informed by contemporary ecofeminist thought, the artist reinterprets the life of Margherita Datini, wife of the renowned 14th-century textile merchant from Prato, to offer a political reflection on the historically unrecognized labor of women within Western economic systems.
We’ll also be presenting a special edition of artist multiples, created by Frowijn and co-produced with Lottozero.

Throughout the evening, get hands-on with upcycled crafts — from screen printing to embroidery — all in support of Palestine. Bring a tote bag or t-shirt to screenprint or embroider — we’ll provide materials, guidance, and our @refashionizedproject how-to video to help you stitch something personal.
Participation in the upcycling activity is donation-based (20€-50€), with all proceeds going to support Palestinian families arriving in Florence.

The independent spaces taking part in the 3rd edition of Aprto are: Atelier Arianna Moroder @ariannamoroder, @kinkaleri_spaziok, @dryphoto_artecontemporanea, @chorasis.lospaziodellavisione, @fondazioneitalobolano, @sc17_studiocorte_17

With the support of the Municipality of Prato.

Malgorzata Maria Olchowska, cover for “werk, bauen + wohnen”, 2024.

Małgorzata Olchowska is an architect and print maker with an artistic practice that explores the boundaries of architecture. Known for her conceptual approach to drawings, sketches, and collages, she uses printmaking as a medium to tell stories about architecture, adding a tactile dimension to the visual language of the built environment, where themes of memory and displacement become central.
The relationship between print making and architecture is a recurring theme in Olchowska’s practice, in which the two disciplines are considered equivalent: “Both stem from a love of craftsmanship, in which the design process is central.”

During her one month residency at Lottozero (7–31 July), she will explore how textile can be incorporated into her practice, experimenting with digital jacquard weaving, tufting, felting, and silkscreen printing.

Olchowska studied architecture and urban planning in Poland, the United Kingdom, and at TU Delft in the Netherlands. After graduating, she worked as an architect at the firms De Vylder Vinck Taillieu, Murmuur, and Bovenbouw. Since 2016, she has been associated with various academic institutions, including the University of Ghent and the Rotterdam Academy of Bouwkunst. Olchowska’s work is regularly presented in exhibitions, conceived as opportunities to experiment with scenography—often in collaboration with Atelier Oh.

In 2023, her first monographic book, Waiting Rooms of Architecture, was published by the Flemish Architecture Institute.

Marina Contro is a hand weaver and artist based in San Francisco. Her work employs traditional weaving techniques and natural materials to explore the overlap between objects of use and objects of thought. Through weaving, she explores a space where function and meaning become inseparable.

During her two-week residency at Lottozero (June 23 – July 6), Marina is conducting material research by sourcing diverse yarns from the district and weaving samples to explore their tactile and structural qualities.

Marina Contro received an MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2017) and a BA in Religious Studies from University of Colorado Boulder (2009). She has taught at California College of the Arts and School of the Art Institute of Chicago and held residencies at Castello di Potentino, Andrea Zittel's A-Z West, Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio, and Marshfield School of Weaving.

Draba II, 2026, seven of eight hand-woven cotton towels, day 32 of use, one’s gone missing.