vision
Folk Lounge works around the following ten themes and questions. We offer them as contributions to a larger conversation about how we gather, make, and belong.
1/10 COSMOS: The beauty of life is an eternal celebration. To adorn and decorate is to honor that magnificence—a harmony that extends beyond ourselves to encompass all life. This is the fairy tale frequency that resonates across cultures: timeless work that opens doors to universality, connecting us to the ecology, mythology, and cosmology of ancient peoples.
2/10 EMBODIED COGNITION: Hand intelligence and multi-sensory materiality engage capacities we've left dormant. Working with our hands expands our human range—not just what we can make, but what we can feel. These experiences ripple through the body, creating new pathways for understanding. How do we support emerging ways to reflect culture through the body and senses?
3/10 REVERSING TIME: Temporal spaces slow us down and ground us in a centered present, restoring nervous systems frayed by acceleration. Non-goal-oriented environments become regenerative when we honor restorative being alongside productive doing. Here, flow and oneness with life become possible. How do we protect and proliferate these rare pockets of slowness?
4/10 DREAMING: Through the prism of potentiality, all is possible when we keep turning the kaleidoscope—tasting new worlds and shaping taste itself. Cultural sustainability invites us to notice the subtle gaps in values around us, then build back what's been lost: healing practices, fluency in multiple ways of knowing, and imagination for what could be. What futures do we want to make inevitable?
5/10 FLUID LEARNING: Cross-generational pollination and peer-to-peer exchange distribute creative capacity throughout our community. Boundaries blur: teachers become students, experts remember being beginners, knowledge circulates rather than consolidates. We treat traditions as seeds that need planting and tending, not just archiving. How do we create conditions where everyone both teaches and learns?
6/10 PROPAGATION IN COMMUNITY: Reciprocity, diversity, learning—the sharing of stories, nature, recipes, regions, stitches, histories, and modes of thinking. All of this questions the static experience. Exploring the concept of the other and ourselves becomes a social experiment that softens us to contradiction: the good and bad within us and among our fellows. Together, we negotiate the values of the new world we're assembling. What do we want to propagate, and what do we want to compost?
7/10 REWILDING THE EYE: The call to the outdoors reconnects us with relationships, cycles, and landscapes that have always been there, waiting. In Strangers Love Doing Strange Things Together, the authors remind us how to explore cities with fresh eyes. We extend this practice to land itself—learning to see what we've stopped noticing, developing intimacy with place. How do we make communion with nature not occasional, but habitual?
8/10 PLACEMAKING: Gathering in public spaces, we develop memories for local landscapes and celebrate opportunities to meet our neighbors in facilities built for collective use. This is how we expand beyond the narrow channels of our individual lives while building respect for the places we inhabit. What does it mean to truly belong to a place, rather than simply occupy it?
9/10 ROOTS & WINGS: Our greatest gift to future generations is freedom to synthesize multiple inheritances into something authentic to their own experience. Living traditions must breathe—evolving through periods of blooming, migration, and disruption. This requires holding tension: honoring what was while making space for what will be. How do we pass down both the seeds and the permission to plant them differently?
10/10 NEW ECONOMIES Previous eras of ornament are deeply colonial and Orientalist. On the other side, fear of cultural appropriation can freeze the playground of exchange. We find ourselves between extraction and paralysis, seeking a third way. What new terms, practices, methodologies, and leadership can help us arrive at more reciprocal creative futures? How do we build economies of respect, citation, and fair exchange around cultural knowledge?
leadership
Shagho is a multidisciplinary design leader, artist, and cultural practitioner who works at the frontiers of innovation and community. As founder of Folk Lounge, facilitates cultural programming to study the grammar of ornament known for Embroidery Socials across LA parks to explore how traditional craft practices foster community, continue cultural preservation in contemporary urban settings, connect us with land and encourage being. Born in Vladivostok, of Armenian and Russian heritage, she holds a BS in Fashion Design and an MFA in Human-Computer Interaction from California College of the Arts. She believes in the power of collective making to weave new connections between past wisdom and future possibility.
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We collaborate on content and programs exploring cultural sustainability, ornamental heritage, and embodied craft.
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Engaging talks on cultural craft, ornamental traditions, and embodied practice for conferences, workshops, and private events.
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“My vision for the Folk Lounge is to use embroidery as a vehicle for learning craft, ornament & skill that creates inner harmony, peace and a creative outlet, but also goes into deeper domains of our ancestry, our diversity as well as unity.
To connect us to land, lore, flora and fauna. Practicing textile arts is also learning symbolism, mythology and the creation stories of the world, with a sprinkle of music and dance to honor joy & ecstatic flow of the present moment.”
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