Our atelier stands in Lazaina, a village at the foot of the sacred hills of Ambohimanga, in the Highlands of Madagascar. The place itself gives our work its ground: a landscape dense with history and meaning.
Here we practise a contemporary form of craft, held to a high standard of gesture and material and driven by the pleasure of making. Rather than hold tradition still, we let it answer other eyes, other techniques and other forms.
The crafts of our region are our instruments, and what they serve is a contemporary visual language. They let us compose singular pieces, follow formal paths that have not been taken before and work with materials, textures and uses that reach well beyond the usual bounds of Malagasy craft. It is this openness, this consent to change, that keeps us in conversation with the world and allows our gestures to endure rather than merely persist.
Ours is a hybrid model: we employ artisans within our own workshops, and we work in close collaboration with independent craftspeople.
This flexible structure lets us train and stand by our embroiderers over the long term, while drawing on complementary skills carried by artisans attached to a family or personal practice.
Thirty artisans design and craft with us work of the highest precision, from the making of one-of-a-kind motifs to the most ingenious of finishes. Painter and draughtsman, embroiderers, weavers, machinists: each one carries the resonance of a shared cultural inheritance, contributes new approaches to our crafts and supports the economic vitality of their territory.
Drawing on the rich palette of its three crafts and on a complementary practice of making-up, the atelier offers its clients a wide service: from the design of unique motifs with a painter working in-house, to the selection of materials for the weavings, through to the finished textile object.
It also draws on a network of partner ateliers in metalwork, fine marquetry, cabinetmaking, bobbin lace and basketry, calling on a fertile ecosystem of Malagasy artisans to bring to life pieces that answer every vision.
Ampela was born of a dialogue between a mother and a daughter, two women who chose to join their perspectives rather than divide them. Between them, a family textile workshop became a fine crafts atelier, a way to grant Malagasy embroidery a new visibility while honouring a debt to the land that formed them. Their work holds transmission and reinvention in a single gesture: keeping a fragile craft alive on just terms and bringing forth pieces that carry at once an intimate history, a rare craft and an exacting vision of what Malagasy craft may be today.
« Within the word craft lies the word art. It is a creative discipline, and it asks for rules, for rigour, for a sense of pursuit. Aristotle knew it already: excellence is not an act but a habit. »
For more than twenty years, Haingotiana has led textile houses, among them the atelier where Ampela is made today.
From that long practice of making in Madagascar came her decision, with Ampela, to remake her own way of working and to place the craft itself, and the land that carries it, at the centre.
« Ampela is my valim-babena*: a way of returning what I was given, to my island, to my culture and to every gaze that watched me come into the world and taught me how to see. »
Emilie came to craft in her mother's workshops and in those of her godfather, among the embroiderers and lacemakers who passed down both the gestures and the worth of patient time and among the aesthetes who lent her their eye early, so that she might form her own.
Certain that the value of craft reaches past technical mastery and inherited skill, she works through Ampela to affirm a single conviction: that the crafts of Madagascar are living things and that to endure they must ceaselessly reinvent themselves and find new forms in which to exist.
* In Malagasy, valim-babena names the act of returning what one has received, a symbolic debt to those, whether people or places, who once bore us and handed on what they held.
The artisans are at the heart of our work. Alongside them, a few people make that work possible day after day: at the atelier, in our exchanges with the outside world, in the shaping of motifs.
Kaliana
Head of communications, she stands beside the atelier daily so that its work may be told to the world.
Tsilavina
Head of the atelier, Tsilavina organises and oversees its daily work and ensures the true making of every piece.
Tovo
A painter, Tovo imagines with us the unique drawings and motifs our embroidery brings to life for each client.
Nasy
Nasy takes care of the errands and journeys of the atelier. His logistical work is central to keeping the whole in motion.