The much-anticipated Woori Festival returns to the township of Loho in Ghana’s Upper West Region for its fifth anniversary, running from March 6 to June 30, 2025.
Organized by the Nubuke Foundation Centre for Textiles and Clay, the festival has grown from its initial focus on celebrating the rich handwoven traditions of the Upper West into a vibrant event featuring skill exchanges, art exhibitions, fashion shows, poetry performances, food tastings, music performances, and film screenings.
This year’s festival is themed: “The Role of Collaboration in Harnessing the Potential of Weaving for Socio-Economic Development.”
Significantly, the festival’s opening coincides with International Women’s Day, providing an opportunity to honor the weaving traditions of the Upper West and Ghana. The event will celebrate women’s role as cultural preservers and economic drivers, recognizing how weaving has transformed the fortunes of their families, communities, and villages.
The festival also responds to the thought-provoking question: “Why Collaborate?”, posed by Austrian visual artist and Professor Barbara Putz-Plecko, who participated in the festival’s 2021–2024 editions. Inspired by Putz-Plecko’s call for mutual learning, this year’s event will feature performative, process-based, and participatory contributions from artists and experts from Ghana, the USA, Germany, and Austria.
For the first time, Woori 2025 will take place across three locations, with the discursive, durational, and performative aspects happening between March 6 and 9, 2025.
A diverse lineup of artists — including Jemima Fordjour, Blanche Boni-Mississo, Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku, Simon Bowman Jnr, King David Osabutey, Fran Redeker, Dzidefo Amegatsey, and Enoch Laryea Nii-Adjei — will present works from their textile and fiber art practices. Some of their projects will focus on making art more accessible to the public, engaging youth, children, and members of visually impaired and deaf communities.
The exhibition will remain open until the end of June 2025, providing an extended opportunity for the public to experience and engage with the festival’s creative and cultural showcases.
Highlights include:
Skill exchange workshops led by the University of Applied Arts, Vienna will feature weavers from Modern Traditional Cloth Weavers Association (Nadowli), Tietaa Weavers Association (Nandom), all from the Upper West region. The workshop will focus on traditional and contemporary weaving techniques, sustainable practices, and innovative textile design. Visitors should expect to be engaged in hands-on workshops with weavers and artists using recycled plastics. The festival celebrates othercreativity and innovation with poetry, music, performance, film, food, fashion and literature.
Nubuke Foundation
Nubuke Foundation is a private visual art and cultural institution based in Accra, Ghana. Founded in 2006, it serves as a nexus for arts and culture across the country while supporting the artistic practice of emerging and established Ghanaian artists.
The foundation’s programming includes exhibitions, art talks, seminars, workshops and spaces for drama, poetry, music and film collaborations. Nubuke Foundation is a member of the Arts Collaboratory Network.
Arts Collaboratory
Arts Collaboratory (AC) is a network of twenty-five diverse arts organisations in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe. AC is a trans-local ecosystem, focusing on
art practices and processes of social change and working with communities within and beyond the arts.
