Marie Gastini’s The Bond at the India Art Fair 2026
Presented in the Design section of the India Art Fair 2026, The Bond marks the culmination of Marie Gastini’s residency with Æquō Gallery, as laureate of the Villa Swagatam × Æquo Prize awarded at the 9th Design Parade festival organised by Villa Noailles.
Arriving in Mumbai in November 2025, Gastini undertook her Villa Swagatam residency with a clear intention: to engage Indian craft heritage not as static tradition, but as a living, collective practice. What emerged is an installation that moves embroidery beyond ornament and into structure, transforming thread into architecture, memory into material, and attachment into form.
An Intimate Inventory and Embroidery as Architecture
The Bond begins with a deeply personal gesture. Gastini assembled an inventory of objects gathered since childhood, chosen, claimed, sometimes seized by instinct rather than inherited. Some once belonged to her mother; others to figures of affection and intimacy. Over time, these objects settled into daily life, until the spaces they occupied became spaces of shelter. For Gastini, these seemingly inert forms carry presence. Their charge is emotional. From this attachment arises a fundamental question: how can an affective bond take form?
Developed in close creative collaboration with Amal Embroideries in Mumbai, in their first partnership with Æquō Gallery, the project unfolded through constant exchange, experimentation and testing. The ateliers engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the artist, allowing embroidery to move beyond surface decoration and become structure and volume.
At the heart of the installation lies an embroidered core, accompanied by modular seating and sculptural lighting elements. Pearls, fastening systems and ornamental gestures drawn from childhood memory are reinterpreted as functional structures. Objects hold together through proximity, tension and care. What appears delicate reveals itself as load-bearing. What seems ornamental becomes foundational. The embroidered wall appliqué, part of the larger installation, exemplifies this shift: embroidery here is not embellishment but connective tissue, a structural language that binds components into a unified whole.
A Dialogue Between Cultures
Bringing together Gastini’s visual vocabulary and conceptual sensibility with the artisanal excellence and savoir-faire of Indian embroidery traditions, The Bond embodies a genuine intercultural dialogue. The project reflects the ethos of Villa Swagatam: immersion, reciprocity and shared authorship.
Receiving critical acclaim during its exhibition at the India Art Fair, the installation marks a successful collaboration between the French Institute in India and the finest cultural actors in the domain of design and contemporary art across India and France. Following the fair, parts of the installation were exhibited at the French Institute in India as part of The New Cultural Passeurs, organised in honour of the official visit of the President of the French Republic to India, and later at Bikaner House during India Design ID 2026.
