The European Textile Network was set up informally in Erfurt in 1991 and formally founded two years later under Alsatian law, operating today from the Textile Centre Haslach in Austria. It exists to do something essential: connect the people who make, teach, collect and study textiles across borders, so that a weaver in Athens and an archivist in Austria have somewhere to compare notes. Membership is open to anyone with a genuine interest in textiles, which gives the network its particular breadth.
Details of the ETN (European Textile Network) Textile Conference in Athens, Greece
This October, that connection takes physical form. ETN's 2026 conference, Visions & Traditions, runs 21 to 23 October at the Stelios Foundation Conference Hall in Plaka, with a Thursday excursion to Nafplio and the archaeological site of Mycenae. The premise is straightforward: put Greece's textile history in direct conversation with the artists working right now, rather than treating one as background for the other.
Textile expert Sofia Tsourinaki, who will be presenting at the conference.
The speaker list bears that out. George Tsiakiris of the Tsiakiris Silk House will talk on Soufli silk, where sericulture and weaving still travel from one generation to the next, and where the Silk Art Museum doubles as a working bridge into sustainable production. Sofia Tsourinaki goes further back still, reading looped-pile weaving as a form of transmitted knowledge that moved across the Eastern Mediterranean long before it moved as commodity. Ismini Samanidou opens proceedings with a talk entitled Weaving as Connection, a fitting keynote for a conference built entirely on that premise.
Maria Sigma, who will present 'Weaving In Between' at the ETN conference.
Set against that history, Katerina Nakou, who returned to her native Athens in 2023 to open her studio, will speak on weaving as a way of testing tradition rather than simply repeating it. Alexandra Bissa works a dobby loom to produce pieces she describes as a conversation between craft and digital process. Maria Sigma restricts herself to undyed fibres and zero-waste methods, arguing that heritage stays useful only when it keeps changing hands.
Bridal bolster depicting a wedding scene. Silk embroidery on linen. loannina, Epirus, 17th-18th century. Courtesy of the Benaki Museum.
Further afield, Maria Varela's research into weaving and tourism in northern Morocco follows three women navigating a market that increasingly wants souvenirs faster and cheaper than craft can honestly provide. Eleni Danesi's live piece Hemp Body turns fibre preparation into performance, the twisting and stretching of hemp generating both sound and cloth. In the Netherlands, Michelle Baggerman and designer Jos Klarenbeek have fitted open-source electronics into retired industrial jacquard looms at TextielMuseum Tilburg, giving old machines new working lives.
Beyond the lecture hall, the programme opens outward: a Benaki Museum tour on reading ancient textiles through absence as much as object, plus hands-on workshops in wet felting, passementerie and sprang. For anyone who thinks textile history and textile practice belong in separate rooms, Athens this October is arguing otherwise.
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Further Information:
ETN's 2026 conference, Visions & Traditions, runs 21 to 23 October at the Stelios Foundation Conference Hall in Plaka, with a Thursday excursion to Nafplio and the archaeological site of Mycenae.
European Textile Network (ETN)
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Image Credits:
Lead: Fragment of Coptic woollen tapestry, probably a screen curtain, with the expressionistic head of a female figure, perhaps the personification of Spring. 3rd-4th c. (Benaki Museum, Athens)
All further images as credited in captions.