EYE OF THE NEEDLE
A Ritual Arts Immersion
With Melissa Word & Nico Wolf
Online in October, plus optional in person residency in November in Santa Fe, NM
Eye of the Needle (EOTN) is a ritual arts immersion woven across online and in-person experiences, culminating in a six-day creative residency in the wilds of New Mexico’s high desert. This gathering of visionaries, artists, grief tenders, and dreamers invites participants to become both undertakers of a dying overculture and midwives of future stories—through the teachings of rupture and reunion and the living practices of fiber arts, embodied making, dream ceremony, seership, land-listening, and improvisational quilting.
Together, we honor creative process as a devotional act—not solely of self-expression, but of reweaving the frayed threads of belonging. As inherited patterns are unstitched, something more attuned to the web of life may emerge—guided by Spirit, ancestral presence, and the Unseen.
Our shared journey begins online, where each participant’s thread of story is offered to the loom of collective practice. Foundational stitching techniques are paired with somatic attunement and dreamwork, while guest speakers join our virtual sewing circles—bringing insight, inspiration, and new colors and textures to the weave.
The in-person residency offers deep time with cloth, body, and land—unraveling, remaking, and co-creating a large-scale community quilt that becomes both the heart of this offering and the dreaming grounds for a collectively sourced re-creation myth. Each day includes hands-on making, grief rituals, somatic practice, ceremony, seership practice, dreamwork, and storytelling circles that honor personal lineages, ancestral relationality (past and future), and tend to and celebrate the repair of our intricate kinship with each other and the more-than-human world.
Some cool Melissa quote…
The Structure:
This course takes place first online over the course of a month, then in person for a week long immersion in Santa Fe, NM.
For our in person module, we’ll gather for a 6 night, 7 day fully residential artist in residency immersion to engage with healing practices, create ritual loom weavings, fiber arts pieces and hold group ceremony.
We will conclude with a group gallery show of our co-created large-scale community quilt that will be installed as a giant tent to become both the heart of this offering and the dreaming and storytelling grounds for a collectively sourced re-creation myth.
Our coursework includes:
Personal and Collective Grief Work
Fiber arts skill building in sewing & quilting
Ritual Dreamwork & Social Dreaming
Dream Weaving
Art-based Ritual Practice
Land Listening
Ancestral Work
Gnosis/Working body as guide
Nervous system tending
Somatics, Embodiment and Movement practices
Integrating our insights, healing gifts and shifts in worldview through written and spoken word and ritual craft making.
Working with the Healing Story & The Re-Creation Myth
Curation of a gallery show and offering of immersive community ceremony
Part I (Online Dates):
Part II (In Person Dates):
About your guides:
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Nico Wolf (Nicole Haciba Burke) is a healing practitioner, trans-disciplinary artist, writer, guide and facilitator of dreamwork, ceremony, embodiment practices, Earth wisdom ways and animistic-based healing work. Her work incites rebellion against the status quo and invites fellow humans toward endless curiosity, courageous authenticity, compassion, and connectivity.
For 10 years, Nico and her husband Ryan stewarded Golden Well Sanctuary - a retreat and regenerative farm in central Vermont devoted to re-potentiating our relationship with the living Earth through cultivating deeper and more meaningful connections between Nature, Spirit, Self and Community. After selling their farm in 2021, the couple moved to Brooklyn, NY for a year where they transitioned their work to School of Liminal Arts - a platform to house not only their offerings, but to expand into more creative collaborations. They explored Europe for a year and have recently returned to New Mexico where they plan to settle for a while.
Born in Hong Kong to a Moroccan/Algerian mother and an Irish/Polish/American father, Nico’s work is influenced by a life of multiculturalism, travel, adventure and seeking new perspectives. In addition to nearly two decades in the healing arts, her experiences range from artist and fashion designer to beekeeper, organic farmer and ceremonialist. Nico has undertaken several formal apprenticeships in Japanese medicine and acupressure, Classical Shamanism, and Shamanic practice based on the wisdom of the serpent and the honeybee.
Nico’s diverse background and multi-faceted worldview has inspired her to create spaces that elicit a deep sense of anything-goes-ness, belonging and freedom where the full palate of human expression and creative impulse comes to the surface. Through her group and private sessions, she ushers participants towards the transformation that can occur when finding oneself in unexpected and non-dual realities.
More info: nicogoldenwolf.com
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Accompanied by Melissa Word.
Melissa is a textile collage artist, dancer, movement guide, grief and death doula, shaped by the wild aliveness of the landscape and culture of the South (Turtle Island).
As a facilitator, she helps people heal their creative lives and explore their relationship to their bodies and mortality.
Her background as a professional dancer shapeshifted into creating experiences for others to get more in touch with their own way of moving, and a fulfilling textile-based art studio practice. Working with fabric and thread is its own kind of choreography. The materials have an aliveness that want to be expressed through movement, play, cutting up and mending.
As a creative grief coach, she leads a seasonal online workshop for grief processing through quilting and hand-sewing--reimagining healing spaces as ones where our bodies, hands, and intuitive impulses guide the way.
More info about Melissa can be found at: melissaword.com
Nico Wolf and Melissa Word are artists, ritualists, and cultural midwives devoted to the work of weaving beauty, grief, and visionary myth into embodied practice. Together, they hold ceremonial spaces that blur the lines between art-making and world-building, stitching together ancestral memory, somatic wisdom, and a deep reverence for the unseen.
Nico is a dreamworker, seer, and founder of the School of Liminal Arts—known for her animist teachings and mythic approach to cultural repair. Melissa is a somatic movement practitioner, death doula, and performance artist who tends thresholds through embodied presence and grief ritual. Their collaboration is rooted in deep friendship, shared reverence for land-based practice, and a belief in the power of communal art as a vessel for transformation.
Who we’re weaving with…
Báyò Akómoláfé
Writer / Speaker / Public intellectual / TEN founder
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Bayo Akomolafe is the Chief Curator of The Emergence Network, a speaker, author, fugitive neo-materialist com-post-activist public intellectual and Yoruba poet. But when he takes himself less seriously, he is a father to Alethea and Kyah, and the grateful life-partner to Ej as well as the sworn washer of nightly archives of dishes. Bayo was born in 1983 into a Christian home, and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. Losing his diplomat father to a sudden heart complication, Bayo became a reclusive teenager, seeking to get to the “heart of the matter” as a response to his painful loss. After meeting with traditional healers as part of his quest to understand trauma, mental wellbeing and healing in new ways, his deep questions and concerns for decolonized landscapes congealed into a life devoted to exploring the nuances of a “magical” world “too promiscuous to fit neatly into our fondest notions of it.” Now living between India and the United States, Bayo is a father of Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi. He is married to EJ, his dear life-partner of Indian descent. In 2014, Dr. Akomolafe was invited to be the Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Ancient Futures (USA). He left his lecturing position in Covenant University, Nigeria to help build this Alliance. Bayo has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, where he taught on his own formulated concepts of ‘transraciality’ and postactivism. He has also taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality. The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Bayo is a widely celebrated international speaker, teacher, public intellectual, essayist and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak. He is also the Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains’.
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Aerin Dunford
Lead Weaver at TEN / Writer / Artist
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Aerin is the Lead Weaver at ten (@the_emergence_network ) working to cultivate the ground for experiments and practice around the notion of postactivism and asking poignant questions about the way that human response to the crises we face often reproduce the very conditions that have led to those crises. Since the death and stillbirth of her son in 2018, Aerin has been called to work with grief in new ways; she has been reflecting, writing and convening others to metabolize loss together; learn more about her griefwork on her personal blog, In the Name of Rafa.
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info@emergencenetwork.org
Stephen Jenkinson
Culture activist, worker, author
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Chiara Giovando is an artist and curator. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute for her BFA studies and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2011. Based in experimental music practices her work includes installation, performance and film. Giovando works with sound as a material, creating sculptural instances of sound that activate and disrupt psychoacoustic perception. Her films include, Proud Flesh (2008), This Love (2010), Archaic Smile (2011). She was Curator in Residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland OR, and led a full programatic year titled Sound is Matter, she was Co-Director and Curator at Human Resources L.A., where she organized several exhibitions of newly commissioned works. In 2012 she was awarded a research fellowship with German collector and curator René Block that culminated the exhibition Hammer Without a Master: Henning Christiansen’s Archive, an exhibition that included 14 artists and composers as well as archival material. She curated an exhibition of new sound art in Los Angeles titled, The Third Ear, as part of Fellows of Contemporary Art’s Curator’s Lab Award. She was creator of the Sound Structures series in San Francisco that recreated indeterminacy scores ranging from early Japanese Fluxus works to Steve Reich's Pendulum Music, to Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning to new graphic scores. In 2014 she founded Thousand Points of Light, a site-works and residency program in Joshua Tree, CA.Giovando has performed both nationally and internationally.
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Kimberly Johnson
Somatic Practitioner & Author
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Chiara Giovando is an artist and curator. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute for her BFA studies and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2011. Based in experimental music practices her work includes installation, performance and film. Giovando works with sound as a material, creating sculptural instances of sound that activate and disrupt psychoacoustic perception. Her films include, Proud Flesh (2008), This Love (2010), Archaic Smile (2011). She was Curator in Residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland OR, and led a full programatic year titled Sound is Matter, she was Co-Director and Curator at Human Resources L.A., where she organized several exhibitions of newly commissioned works. In 2012 she was awarded a research fellowship with German collector and curator René Block that culminated the exhibition Hammer Without a Master: Henning Christiansen’s Archive, an exhibition that included 14 artists and composers as well as archival material. She curated an exhibition of new sound art in Los Angeles titled, The Third Ear, as part of Fellows of Contemporary Art’s Curator’s Lab Award. She was creator of the Sound Structures series in San Francisco that recreated indeterminacy scores ranging from early Japanese Fluxus works to Steve Reich's Pendulum Music, to Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning to new graphic scores. In 2014 she founded Thousand Points of Light, a site-works and residency program in Joshua Tree, CA.Giovando has performed both nationally and internationally.
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Chiara Giovando
Founder of ICA / Artist / Curator
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Chiara Giovando is an artist and curator. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute for her BFA studies and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2011. Based in experimental music practices her work includes installation, performance and film. Giovando works with sound as a material, creating sculptural instances of sound that activate and disrupt psychoacoustic perception. Her films include, Proud Flesh (2008), This Love (2010), Archaic Smile (2011). She was Curator in Residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland OR, and led a full programatic year titled Sound is Matter, she was Co-Director and Curator at Human Resources L.A., where she organized several exhibitions of newly commissioned works. In 2012 she was awarded a research fellowship with German collector and curator René Block that culminated the exhibition Hammer Without a Master: Henning Christiansen’s Archive, an exhibition that included 14 artists and composers as well as archival material. She curated an exhibition of new sound art in Los Angeles titled, The Third Ear, as part of Fellows of Contemporary Art’s Curator’s Lab Award. She was creator of the Sound Structures series in San Francisco that recreated indeterminacy scores ranging from early Japanese Fluxus works to Steve Reich's Pendulum Music, to Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning to new graphic scores. In 2014 she founded Thousand Points of Light, a site-works and residency program in Joshua Tree, CA.Giovando has performed both nationally and internationally.
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