Threads of Memory is an intimate creative workshop led by Malak Elghuel, an interdisciplinary artist and an integrative therapist, inviting Arab-SWANA women from London’s diasporic communities to gather, reflect, and create from their personal and inherited memories.

Centring textile-making as a gentle form of storytelling and cultural archiving, the session invites participants to explore how memory is held in fabric in the textures of domestic cloth, family garments, inherited patterns, or everyday rituals of care.

Through writing, conversation, and hands-on making with yarn and fabric, participants will create personal textile “memory maps” that visually trace belonging, ancestry, and emotional connection. This workshop offers a space for shared reflection honouring how memory lives in the body, and how making together can preserve what is often unspoken.

Participants are invited to bring a piece of fabric, garment or textile that holds personal or family meaning or any small object that carries memory. You can also bring a scent, colour, or symbol from home (if comfortable) to inform your creative process.

This workshop is organised in partnership with Shubbak as part of their Voices of Resilience series - a project documenting Arab & SWANA cultural memory in London. The creative pieces and maps produced through the workshop will be exhibited as part of the final showcase at Brent Museum & Archives in Spring 2026. With permission from the participants, their work will also be included in the museum’s archives collection.

About the artist
Malak Elghuel is a London-based interdisciplinary artist and integrative therapist whose work moves across installation, textiles, writing, and participatory practice to explore how memory, migration, and emotional inheritance are carried through material, gesture, and everyday ritual. In recent years, her practice has been rooted in textile-based storytelling and community archiving, working with SWANA individuals and diasporic communities to surface and reimagine personal and collective narratives through touch, reflection, and shared making. Grounded in both artistic inquiry and therapeutic care, her work creates spaces where memory can be gently held, honoured, and preserved beyond words.

About Shubbak
Shubbak (meaning ‘window’ in Arabic) is an organisation that supports and celebrates the diversity of Arab and South West Asian & North African (SWANA) artists’ creativity and innovation through its professional, participatory and engagement programmes, national touring and biennial multi-artform festival. Working nationally and internationally, they commission, initiate and develop projects that encourage a wide range of creative approaches in an artist-centred, audience focused process.
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