Bogotá: On Touching Hearts
I arrived at El Dorado, the Bogotá Airport at four in the morning. Tired and stressed and wrung out from the flight and the past months. At 1pm it began with a panel talk to introduce the IV Shibari Week Bogotá. Directly after there was the Varieté, a shibari performance night. I was supposed to do the last performance with Liebre Azul, my tying partner from Colombia whom I had never met in person before.
Before our performance we had only half an hour to find out whether we could understand each other. Not in words, but in movement, in rope, in whatever happens between two bodies during a rope performance.
At the end of the fourth Bogotá Shibari Week I was left feeling more affirmed in my rope practice than I have ever felt before. It took me some days and reflections to understand why.
I Arrived With Doubts
After being invited by Shibari Night, I was doubting if I belonged at the front of such a festival. They had invited me as the international special guest, and a quiet voice in my mind kept asking what I could possibly share with these people that they didn’t already know. What I could bring that’s uniquely mine.
The festival’s theme was silent conversations. And the classes I had planned around it were the hardest thing I could imagine teaching. The fine nuances and the invisible layers of tying. The parts you cannot quite grasp technically, the parts steered by feeling more than by form. I had put together classes I had never taught before, on exactly the thing that resists being taught at all. I did not yet know whether any of it would hold up in front of a room — in a cultural context not my own, about a practice that comes from Japan, not from either of us.
Technique and Feeling
The friction I want to describe is not Colombian, and not European either. It runs through every rope scene I have spent time in. Shibari is an intimate practice that happens (mostly) between two people, and there is a point in many people’s journey where the ego pushes its way into the practice. Where someone wants to prove they are valid, wants to show how good they are, and reaches for technical excellence to do it. Clean lines, correct forms, the purest style, the right vocabulary. And in that reaching, the path of intimacy and often trust gets left behind.
I went to Colombia and recognized my experiences from Europe in some private conversations there. The same two pulls inside the practice. And inside most of us who tie. Almost everyone wants both: the competence and the connection. But people weight them differently, and some lean so far toward technique that rope becomes something to be ranked and earned, while the exchange, the trust, the silent conversation between two bodies slips into the background.
Certificates Don’t Touch Hearts
I do not think the border is drawn out of malice. People pay a lot of money and spend a lot of time to learn this practice, and they want something solid to hold onto. Certification can offer exactly that.
What it quietly assumes is that shibari is a craft whose value lives in correctly executed forms, and that mastery can be ranked, examined, stamped. Learn the patterns, pass the levels, and you are doing it right. Prioritize feeling over form and you are doing something lesser.
I understand the appeal. Technique is teachable and measurable in a way a feeling never is. A solid technique also matters in a practice where so much can go wrong. But I have watched a tool for keeping people physically safe slowly turn into something else: a way of deciding who belongs, the checklist drifting from serving the practice toward policing it.
So my quarrel is not with skill, or with the people who spent years earning it. It is with the moment skill stops being something you learn for the safety of your partner and becomes a badge you have to show at the door.
What gets lost is the part that cannot be certified: presence, the capacity to listen with your hands, the flexibility to get messy, the willingness to not know what comes next.
A Silent Conversation
Azul and I had half an hour. We agreed on a rough outline and had only tied a little, to feel whether we could move together. It was enough to feel confident with each other.
We wanted to open with a statement. Rope performances so often begin the same way. One person seated, the other standing beside them or walking in, the rope present from the first moment. We refused that. Before the curtain opened, we were already on the floor, holding each other in a hug, close like lovers. Calming each other down to get rid of the nervousness.
When the curtain opened, we did not move. We held that position, completely still, for almost three minutes – the length of the short introduction song. As the song ended, we began to move almost in slow motion. It was an intimate moment of exploring each other via movement and touch. Six, maybe seven minutes had passed before we introduced the first rope.
By then the room was already captivated.
And the performance ended as it had begun: Inverted. Me alone, upside down, hanging from a single futomomo, pulled slowly upward with a pulley system to an instrumental of Space Oddity.
People asked us afterwards how we had managed to rehearse the whole performance in such a short time. We mostly hadn’t. The beginning and the end were planned: the still embrace, the inversion to close. Everything in between had been improvised. No choreography to memorize, no forms to reach for. We simply listened to each other and went with the flow.
A Confirmation From Outside
Through the week I taught four workshops, participated in a photoshoot event, and created a collaborative photo work with the community. People told me that it is rare in Colombia to find rope teachings about the emotional and interpersonal aspects of tying.
In conversations I had the sense of a community that wants exactly this, and that does not always find it easy to claim space for it. I cannot make any claims here, because I only heard it in personal conversations — but the shape felt unmistakable to me. It is the same shape I know from running Karada House.
You build something around the relational side of the practice, and somewhere there is always pressure suggesting that this is not quite the real thing, not quite rigorous enough.
Without intending to, I could offer something that felt to some like a confirmation from outside: the human, relational side is legitimate. You do not have to justify it to anyone. Your heart matters.
The Morning Messages
The best way I can describe the warmth of that week is to tell you what happened every morning. I woke up to messages from the organizers. They were mostly not about logistics. These were messages about how the days were going, how their hearts felt. They shared positive feedback from the workshop participants with me. They constantly checked in with me to see how I was doing, asking about my needs. Inquired about my needs. And one message ended simply: “Thank you for giving us part of you.”
That kind of care was far from what I had expected.
I watched the community the same way. The constant checking-in, the way people looked after each other. It was easeful in a way that surprised me, leaving my queer Karada House bubble. Seeing this filled me with some hope.
And on the last day, a fellow queer person came to me in tears, to tell me what those days had given them. By the end, a whole group sat together crying, touched by each other. Very beautiful.
The Open Heart
People are reached when you open your heart, not when you win the argument about what real shibari is. When you share your own way, from passion, instead of reaching for a standard to enforce. Sharing what is yours, giving others space to make it their own, and to disregard what doesn’t make sense to them.
I came to Bogotá with doubts. I left with answers to questions I had not asked. It showed me that you find a place in people’s hearts when you show up with what moves you, and when you leave your ego behind. Open to listen, instead of pretending to have the answers for everything. When I left, I felt that a part of my heart stayed there.
Muchas gracias, Bogotá, sumercé.
Photo Credits: Charles Ilcoatl & Shibari Night
Conversaciones Silenciosas
When Bogotá Shibari Week first reached out, they asked me what the festival theme could be. If it were inspired by my work. I made a suggestion. They came back with Conversaciones Silenciosas. Silent Conversations.
It was better than what I had proposed. It named something I’d been circling for a long time.
What do bodies say when words lose their meaning? What conversations happen between tension and release, between tying and being tied? I’ve been asking this for years. In rope, in photography, in film. And now a whole week in Bogotá runs under that exact question.
That made me thoughtful, and got me looking at my own work with different eyes. What am I actually doing here? What do I want to say? What conversations am I trying to have?
And then the other direction: what happens when I bring these questions to Bogotá? To Colombia. To a community I’m still getting to know and curious about. It goes both ways — what I bring, and what I take back. What I learn. Where this practice leads me next.
Where I’ll Be
Varieté: Between Pink & Blue · May 18
A performance collaboration with Azul Ropes on opening night. The title says something about where bodies are allowed to exist — between the colors we’re assigned, in the space that’s supposedly empty.
Opening Conversatorio · May 18
¿Cuerpos que conversan sin palabras? — A panel discussion to open the week.
Workshop: Kimé · May 19
Emotional impact in rope sessions. Moments of peak intensity in a session: not necessarily the most extreme physical moment, but the one where something shifts. How do we recognize it? How do we hold it? How do we come back from it?
Workshop: Body, Movement & Rope Connection · May 20
Rope as a sensory and relational system. What does it mean to let the rope moves with a body rather than simply constrain it?
Workshop: Edge & Play · May 20
Erotic exploration through rope — for couples.
Workshop: Solo-Flow · May 21
Atad@ a mí mism@. Tied to oneself. For participants who come alone — a space for practicing rope as a relationship with your own body, without a partner as intermediary.
Shibari for Photography · May 21
Both sides of the rope. Both sides of the lens.
Rope Triptych — Collaborative Art · May 22
Three perspectives, one visual structure. A collaborative art session that takes rope out of the session context and into something explicitly compositional. Artistically inspired by the cover art work of ’Ritual de lo Habitual‘ from Jane’s Addiction.
Empty Rope: When the Body Leaves, What Remains?
In 2021, I began creating something I had never seen before: rope sculptures without bodies. Shibari patterns frozen in space, holding only air and memory. I was thrilled with what emerged — these sculptural forms felt entirely new to me, a way of seeing rope I hadn’t encountered in my years of practice. Only in 2025, shortly after sharing the first images publicly, did someone point out that a Belgian artist named Shadow had explored remarkably similar ideas back in 2011. Two artists, separated by time and geography, arriving at the same visual language independently. This moment of humility became the starting point for a deeper question:
What does it mean to create in a practice where ideas flow like water — where lineage matters deeply, but ownership feels impossible?
The Paradox of Ownership in Shibari
In the international rope scene, debates have long raged over who can “own” ideas, techniques, styles, or images. Some ties are so distinctive they can be immediately attributed to a specific person, school, or style — sometimes even bearing that person’s name. But here’s the fundamental question:
Can rope as an art form even be owned at all?
Could a harness ever be patented?
My earliest rope sculptures — the ones shown here — are a perfect example of this tension. Anyone deeply immersed in the craft can instantly recognize the stylistic origins of each piece. They carry visible lineage, echoes of teachers and traditions that shaped my hands. I learned these forms through transmission — through watching, being tied, tying others, attending workshops, studying with teachers who themselves learned from teachers. The knowledge lives in my hands because it passed through other hands first. So when I create a sculpture based on these forms, what am I creating? Something entirely new? Or something that carries the weight of everyone who came before?
The Body as Essential Element
If we take the idea of “intellectual property” in rope seriously and strip it to its core, what becomes of the work when the body is removed? Does rope, in the absence of a body, automatically become art? Or is what remains merely the residue of an act that once unfolded upon skin, breath, sensation? And if the imprint remains on the body instead — in marks, in sensation, in memory — is the rope work incomplete without it?
Traces That Cannot Be Patented
Those who have been tied in an intense session rarely seek to recreate it for the sake of wearing a “fashionable” art form on their skin. What they return to are the traces — visible and invisible — left by the rope. These traces anchor memory. They offer clues to an experience that cannot be fully captured in words, and certainly cannot be patented. The rope leaves its mark. The body holds the memory. Neither can be owned.
When I create these sculptures, I’m freezing a moment that is usually ephemeral. The body is absent, but its shell remains — in the curve of the rope, in the tension held by the knots, in the negative space that suggests weight and breath.
From Legacy to Commodification
In art and rope practice, there is often a desire to honor legacy — to acknowledge where knowledge comes from, to recognize teachers, influences, and the countless hands that shaped a form. Yet in a capitalist framework, these same impulses are often distorted. The wish to honor and preserve can become a drive for ownership: intellectual property, trademarks, certifications. Labor and craft are assigned purely monetary value, and ideas are enclosed and protected as if they were commodities. What begins as recognition of influence can turn into claims of possession.
And in this process, many voices vanish. The subtle contributions of countless makers — teachers, peers, uncredited hands — are flattened, anonymized, or forgotten. Only a few “recognized” names remain — the trademarks, if you will — attached to works that are inherently collaborative.
Living in the Tension
It is precisely in this field of tension — between legacy and commodification, acknowledgment and ownership — that we operate. Fairness and justice in art cannot be reduced to legal claims or certifications. They live instead in dialogue, transparency, and co-creation. This is why I credit the lineages of my rope sculptures explicitly (to the best of my knowledge). Not because I’m required to, but because it matters. These forms didn’t spring fully formed from my imagination — they carry the DNA of specific teaching lineages, specific approaches to the body, specific philosophies of rope. To name that lineage is not to diminish my work. It’s to place it in context, in conversation, in community.
Ideas as Currents in a Shared Sea
When I discovered Shadow’s “Invisible Bunnies” from 2011, I recognized. Here was someone else asking the same questions I was asking: What is rope without the body? Can these forms stand alone? What do they communicate in their absence? Ideas emerge in different places, often at the same time, often independently of one another. Two artists, separated by time and space, can still arrive at a similar visual language — and therein lies the beauty.
Perhaps the most beautiful thing about art is not to own something, but to be part of a story that is bigger than ourselves. Ideas are not private islands. They are currents in a shared sea. When we create, we’re not pulling ideas from a void — we’re responding to what’s around us, what we’ve learned, what we’ve felt, what others before us have already begun to articulate.
Empty Rope — The Work Itself
Empty Rope is a series of rope sculptures and photographs exploring what remains when the body is removed from shibari.
- The sculptural potential of rope as a standalone form
- The memory and tension held within knots
- The absence of the body as presence
- The question of whether rope can be “complete” without skin
- Lineage, transmission, and intellectual property in rope arts
The sculptures are based on traditional shibari forms — Takate Kote & Gote (hands-behind-back tied) and others — executed precisely as I learned them, but photographed, filmed, and presented as sculptural objects rather than live rope work.
When you’ve felt the rope on your own body, you understand it differently. You know what it holds even when empty. The rope holds memory. The viewer brings the body.
On Lineage and Attribution
The attributions reflect the teaching lineages through which I learned these forms. They are not claims of direct study with these specific artists, but acknowledgments of the stylistic and technical approaches that shaped my practice. In rope, we learn through chains of transmission. I have learned from teachers who learned from teachers. The knowledge in my hands has traveled through many hands before mine. To credit lineage is to honor that transmission. It’s to say: this didn’t start with me, and it won’t end with me.