The collaboration with Marie Gastini developed through the Villa Swagatam Residency Program, supported by the Institut français in India and in dialogue with the Design Parade of Toulon (France) Within this framework, Æquo was given the opportunity to invite an emerging talent to Mumbai and to anchor her first exploration of India within the ecosystem it cultivates.
One of Æquo’s defining strengths lies in building bridges between designers and workshops. For Marie Gastini, whose background spans textile, fashion environments, and scenographic construction, the residency offered complete latitude. Invited to Bombay, she was encouraged to develop her ideas freely, working in close proximity with artisans and allowing form to emerge through process rather than prescription.
This project marks the first collaboration between Æquo and Amal Embroideries, an atelier long admired by the gallery, whose involvement revealed, with quiet force, the depth and sophistication of Indian embroidery. Founded twenty-five years ago in Mumbai, Amal Embroideries collaborates today with the world’s leading luxury houses and operates between Mumbai, Rome, and Paris. This international presence enabled the first exchanges with Marie in Paris, before the collaboration naturally unfolded on site in Mumbai. Welcomed into Amal’s ateliers, Marie worked directly with embroiderers, exploring archives, testing densities and scales, and engaging deeply with the structural possibilities of thread. What emerged was a true aesthetic collaboration, shaped jointly through dialogue and making.
This exchange gave rise to the central embroidered work of the installation, alongside a series of modular seating elements and sculptural lights inspired by childhood recollections: pearls, fastening systems, intimate ornamental gestures reimagined as functional structures. These objects form the core of an environment conceived for presentation at the India Art Fair in New Delhi.
Alongside the pieces developed with Amal Embroideries, Æquō continued to work with its long-standing Mumbai ateliers, including its closest bronze casters and carpenters, reinforcing the wider constellation of savoir-faire that defines the gallery’s practice and where a residency unfolds into a collection that could only exist through this shared commitment.
