About

Arantza’s work spans multiple disciplines, is deeply invested in processes, and is driven by material investigation. She is interested in combining ancients crafts with sustainable methods to innovate, provoke reflection and develop a sense of narrative. An undercurrent throughout is an exploration of concepts of time.

She is affiliated to research groups such as the Wearable Computing team at Universität der Künst Berlin and the Bio-Inspired Textiles Research group at University of the Arts London, and is a visiting lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Pinaki Studios

For more than a decade Arantza worked under the name of Pinaki Studios with a network of professionals that assisted and collaborated on projects. As a project-based studio it grew into a renowned practice with a host of high profile clients including HBO and the BBC, as well as exhibiting in museums and galleries in Spain, Italy and Cuba. The crisis of Covid-19 was the catalyst for an in-depth re-evaluation of this vision and a shift towards a more considered and mindful practice.

Sustainability

This process prioritised the environmental impact and sustainability of the practice. Since then she has emphasised research and incorporated the sustainability pillars introduced by the BIT framework to focus on design with resource efficiency, longevity and recovery in mind. 

Investing time in the procurement of materials and understanding their provenance has become key, as well as favouring natural colouration and cold or waterless processes in the development stage. 

Zero waste in a wide range of areas of the practice is an aspiration: this, at the moment, is managed through careful calculation and attention to waste as a resource, reuse and recycling. Communicating this broadly has become important, as transparency assists accountability.

The current website has also been designed with low energy impact in mind. Page and image sizes are kept as low as possible, assets such as images are served from a content delivery network to reduce the distance that they need to be sent to the visitor’s browser and our web host is on track to use 100% renewable energy by 2025.

There are plenty of other aspects that require attention such as renewable energy suppliers at the studio (currently impossible due to the freeholder requiring the use of a specific energy supplier) and the incorporation of rigorous methods to measure environmental impact. 

This is a journey, one step at a time… practice makes progress.