At a stone workshop just outside Jaipur, things move fast, but not in the way you’d expect. Inside Frozen Music, a bespoke stone atelier outside Jaipur, India, designers and master artisans work side by side, cutting, shaping and testing materials in real time. It’s here that the Shakti Design Residency comes into focus.
The premise is simple: bring international designers into India’s most skilled workshops and let the work happen there. No distance, no outsourcing, just direct collaboration. Across the residency, that might mean working with glassblowers shaping molten forms, metalworkers hammering brass into suspended structures, or textile artisans building complex woven compositions from region-specific dyes and fibres.
For Shalini Misra, the idea for the Shakti Design Residency came from a frustration that kept repeating itself. “It came directly from the experience of as an interior designer,” she says. “When you work seriously with material and making, when craft is not decoration but structural thinking in your practice, you inevitably start to trace things back to source.” What she found wasn’t a lack of talent, it was the opposite.
