Woori

Woori means “to weave” in Waali. It names both a practice and a way of coming together. Since its first edition in 2021, the Woori Festival has brought weavers, artists, students and audiences to Nubuke Foundation’s Centre for Textiles and Clay in Loho, near Wa, to share knowledge, encounter new work and celebrate the possibilities held within our weaving traditions.

Within Nubuke’s twenty-year story, Woori brings many strands of our work into the same space: recording knowledge, supporting its transmission, and making room for artistic experimentation. The festival grows from relationships with weaving communities in the Upper West Region. It gives those relationships a recurring public occasion, where the making of cloth can be experienced alongside conversations about culture, education and livelihoods.

Before the festival: building relationships

Our engagement with textile weaving in the Upper West Region began in 2010, long before Woori’s first gathering. Working with weaving communities and vocational schools opened a sustained conversation about how indigenous knowledge is learned, practised and carried forward. The Centre in Loho gave this work a place in which to meet, develop and become visible.

Woori builds on partnerships with women’s weaving associations in Nandom, Nadowli and Wa, and with the Schools for the Blind and Deaf in Wa. These relationships are central to the festival’s character. Knowledge enters the programme through the people who hold and practise it: the weaver at a loom, the maker demonstrating a process, the student asking a question, and the artist testing a material in an unfamiliar way.

A first gathering

The maiden edition took place from 26–28 February 2021. It brought weaving designs, workshop experiments and contemporary art into conversation at Loho. Michael Jackson Blebo, Na Chainkua Reindorf, Esther Ofosu, Edward Lamptey and Winfred Nana Amoah were among the participating artists, whose work extended the discussion of fibre and textiles into different forms of artistic practice.

From the outset, Woori drew on the place of festivals in Ghana as occasions for commemoration, celebration and community. Its programme invited people to look closely, listen, contribute and spend time together. Weaving became a point of departure for encounters across visual art, sound, texture, movement and performance.

Knowledge in the making

Live demonstrations and workshops allow the festival’s audiences to encounter the attention, repetition and skill within textile production. A technique becomes legible through watching a pair of hands, handling a material or trying a process. Such exchanges acknowledge the depth of a maker’s experience while opening space for younger participants to learn and contribute.

This is also where questions about continuity become practical. How can a skill remain useful to another generation? What conditions allow a weaver to sustain a livelihood? How can experimentation grow from an understanding of materials and methods? Woori places these questions alongside the work itself, bringing the cultural significance of weaving into conversation with its social and economic life.

The participation of children, young people and communities with different access needs matters to this approach. The festival offers several ways into the conversation—through making, looking, listening, movement and shared activity. Learning takes place across ages and experiences, with the Centre serving as a meeting place for knowledge that moves in many directions.

Tradition as a space for possibility

Across successive editions, exhibitions have brought textile and fibre practices into contact with installation, fashion, film, sound and performance. The presence of contemporary artists creates opportunities to reconsider familiar materials and to see how inherited techniques can inform new expressions. The festival makes room for both the skilled production of cloth and the unexpected uses to which an artist might put a thread, a pattern or a woven surface.

The fourth edition, held from 1–3 March 2024, took the theme Weaving a Sustainable Future for the Next Generation. Demonstrations, workshops and discussions connected the work of master weavers with questions of cultural identity and sustainable development. Exhibitions, school activities and visits to weaving centres extended those conversations, while music, dance, film and spoken word brought people together into the evening.

In 2025, the fifth edition focused on The role of collaboration in harnessing the potential of weaving for socio-economic development. Its emphasis on collective practice and shared knowledge made explicit a concern running through Woori’s history: what people can build together when cultural work is supported as part of everyday life. Traditional looms and contemporary adaptations, local knowledge and visiting artistic practices, all had a place in that exchange.

A living record

Looking back at Woori means attending to more than a sequence of editions. Its history also lives in recurring encounters: a workshop continued in another form, a relationship renewed, a skill demonstrated to someone for the first time. Photographs and programme records hold traces of these exchanges. They help us return to the people and processes that give the festival its meaning.

For Nubuke, Woori is an important expression of a commitment to culture as something people practise, shape and share. As this archive gathers the Foundation’s first twenty years, the festival remains an unfolding part of that story—rooted in the Upper West Region, sustained by its communities, and open to what the next gathering may bring.

Explore the Woori archive

Continue through the edition pages and photographic records on the Nubuke Foundation Wa website.

2021 — The maiden edition ↗
2022 — Woori Festival ↗
2023 — Woori Festival ↗
2024 — Weaving a Sustainable Future ↗
2025 — Collaboration and weaving ↗
2024 — Festival photographs ↗