The residency served as a laboratory for understanding new landscapes, both botanical and cultural, and became an impactful period of material exploration. In the first weeks, I focused on studying, foraging and documenting the flora of Biella, Piedmont. These field encounters formed the basis of a new visual vocabulary rooted in Northern Italy and culminated in a mirrored composition reflecting the region’s abundant biodiversity. Francesca Castagnetti of Cittadellarte's Nourishment Office aided in annotating each plant species with both their scientific name and common name. Our foraging walks through woods, riverbanks, hills and pavements opened up conversations about ethnobotany from pokeberry used in natural dyeing to Prunella vulgaris in herbal medicine. My personal (and pollinators’) favourite was the pink, pointy thistle Carduus pycnocephalus.

Open Studio Day

One recurring discussion focused on the terminology of “native” and “invasive” plants. Although these are technical descriptors of a species’ biogeographic origins, in botany they carry weight because some new species can outcompete native plants for nutrients and space, reshaping entire ecosystems. Yet in the European context, this language is often appropriated to reinforce xenophobic rhetoric and legitimize anti-immigration narratives. Extending the binary of “native” versus “non-native” from plants to people enables processes of vilification, revealing how scientific language can be misapplied and weaponized in social discourse. This felt personal as my grandmother, displaced during the India-Pakistan partition, was forced to flee her “native” Multan and begin a new life as a refugee in India in 1947. And when I have lived outside my “native” India, the term “non-resident alien” has been used on official visa forms to describe my identity. These conversations, shaped by both history and lived experience, made me want to create work beyond the binary, resisting categorization, honouring fluidity and movement, and inviting more porous ways of seeing both plants and people.

As the residency moved into its second month, the work evolved from observation into production and travel-based study, with visits to Venice, Milan, and Turin further expanding my perspective. Encountering projects that engaged with waste, land use, food systems, and material innovation helped me situate my research within a broader discourse on climate futures. At the Venice Biennale, Rootfull’s living tapestry cultivated from wheat roots revealed that architecture and art can literally grow from crops. At Palazzo Grassi, Tatiana Trouvé’s sculptures reimagined everyday objects in marble and bronze, creating an uncanny tension between reality and illusion. In Milan, I was deeply moved by Mexican-British artist Leonora Carrington’s paintings and writings. Carrington drew on surrealism, folklore, alchemy, and feminism to create dreamlike worlds of hybrid more-than-human beings.

Describing the process of wool felting to Michelangelo Pistoletto

I deeply admired the genuine curiosity Michelangelo Pistoletto brought to our studio visit. I shared my method of pressing fallen flowers and heat-transferring compositions onto fabric to preserve their translucency, followed by a demonstration of my wool-felting experiments, increasing from two to six layers to study shifts in density and structure. I outlined how wool fibers are layered, carded, and rolled to form felt, and showed him the mica stones I stitched onto the fabric as a way of materially grounding the work in the regional terrain. His attentive interest, supportive feedback, and repeated “bellissima” felt deeply encouraging!

From the Biella Wool Company, I sourced approximately ten kilograms of Merino and local Biellese wool for wet feeling. Developed in the 5th century by nomadic tribes in Mongolia, wet felting enabled the construction of yurts whose continuous felt coverings required no sewing and could be reused and reassembled for generations. Drawing from this history, I began developing wool-felted dual sculptural seating designed to facilitate dialogue and shared reflection on Biella’s ecology. I researched more than twenty standard chair dimensions to identify measurements that would allow a single felt covering to adapt across multiple forms, so that the pattern could function as a conversation chair in Italy, in India, or elsewhere. Central to this process was creating one continuous piece of felt rather than separate components that would require cumbersome stitching. This approach is representative of how my artmaking often operates through the principles of design, particularly modularity, adaptability, and reuse.

The felt’s design drew from satellite imagery of Biella, abstracting the industrial browns of factory roofs, the white of the encircling mountains, and the five rivers that define the city’s geography. To transform individual wool fibers into a single cohesive fabric, I rolled the two-metre length of felt more than 800 times in multiple directions, working with pressure, water, and heat until the material finally tightened into a durable form. The process was intensely physical and reminded me that working with natural materials and craft can be equally meditative and demanding.

Conversation Chair at the Terzo Paradiso

During the photoshoot at Terzo Paradiso, I unexpectedly met the iconic fashion designer DVF (Diane von Furstenberg). We spoke while sitting on the conversation chair, underscoring the work’s intention to foster new encounters and shared appreciation of the environments that hold us. Throughout the residency, three strands of research emerged: the conversation chair exploring collective reflection through felt and form; the floral tapestry mapping the biodiversity of Piedmont; and an inquiry into how biomass transforms into valuable materials like biochar and bioleather. My work here explored material kinship, treating nature as a collaborator and intertwining local waste ecologies, craft traditions, and the sensorial landscapes of Biella’s abundant flora and rivers.

One of my biggest reflections is how deeply I value making and simply being within a cohort and community of artists. Over the past two months, I developed wholesome friendships with each of the resident artists Ginevra, Laurane, and Izz. We shared meals and recipes, history lessons from our countries, our own philosophies and those of artists we admire, our workflows and materials, and supported one another through everything from preparing for the open studio to suspending finished works into the middle of a river in peak winter for documentation. I am equally grateful to Clara Tosetti, Laura Bellinazzo, Paolo Naldini, and the wider UNIDEE members for their warmth, guidance, transparency and continued support. Biella itself became part of the residency’s education. Walkable cities feel like a form of medicine, and this one encouraged me to walk exponentially more than I usually do. On those daily walks, I often saw people well into their seventies and eighties hiking with friends, partners, or dogs. I saw them joyful, active, and at ease. It made me quietly hopeful about the possibility of aging with health, companionship, and grace, while ideally still making something with my hands.

Get a glimpse into the creation of the Conversation Chair with this video.