Alexander MA
Berlin-based kinbaku teacher, performer and photographer who runs Discover Kinbaku with Natasha NawaTaNeko. He studied Naka Akira's semenawa with Riccardo Wildties from 2016 to 2021 and with Naka in Japan since 2021, and edits the Kinbaku Society of Berlin Magazine.
Alexander MA is a kinbaku practitioner, teacher, performer and photographer based in Berlin. With Natasha NawaTaNeko he teaches, performs and publishes as Discover Kinbaku. His profile describes him as an artist, researcher and educator whose work covers Japanese rope bondage, aesthetics and embodied experience, and sums up his approach in the phrase “not the knot, but the touch.”
Training and lineage
According to his profile, his interest in Japan began well before rope: as a teenager he trained in Japanese martial arts and holds a black belt in Seishinkai Aikido. In kinbaku he focuses on the semenawa of Naka Akira. He studied intensively with Riccardo Wildties, whom the profile calls one of Naka’s long-standing students, from 2016 to 2021, and has studied with Naka himself in Japan since 2021. Before working in rope he spent more than twenty years as a scientist and holds a doctorate in chemistry.
Teaching
In a 2026 class listing the pair say they have tied together since they became a couple in 2011; they teach as a pair, combining the view of the person tying with that of the person in the rope. They run Studio 6×6 in Berlin, offer classes and coaching for couples, and teach workshops abroad; their site lists cities including Tokyo, Brussels, Lisbon, Stockholm, New York and San Francisco. Recent dated examples are a weekend intensive on semenawa at the Berlin studio Daruma in September 2025 and a sold-out evening class on torsion in suspension for Ma Studio in September 2026. His own teaching framework, the Elements System, aims to make technique personal through principles rather than memorized patterns; he says he teaches no fixed forms or dogma.
Publishing, salons and photography
With Natasha NawaTaNeko he co-founded the Kinbaku Society of Berlin Magazine, a print magazine launched in 2019 that he edits as editor-in-chief, and the publishing house Die Goldbomben; both publish photography, essays, interviews and historical research on Japanese rope culture. He also created the Kinbaku Salon, an evening format of talks, screenings, performances and book presentations on kinbaku history, Japanese aesthetics and photography, which the duo say has been presented at festivals and cultural events in New York, London, Copenhagen and Lisbon.
He has photographed for more than thirty years, starting with documentary and street work, and studied photography with Norio Sugiura. In his rope photography, he says, the rope is never the subject but the medium through which emotion and connection become visible.