Dan Carabas
Berlin artist and former fashion photographer and commercial director who came to shibari in Berlin around 2016, names Nicolas Yoroi and Hajime Kinoko among his teachers, and founded Shibari Studio Berlin in 2024, where he teaches what he calls the art of shibari with intention.
Dan Carabas is a Berlin-based artist and shibari teacher who founded Shibari Studio Berlin, an artist-led rope studio in Berlin-Mitte, in 2024. He describes his teaching as “the art of shibari with intention” and frames rope as an intimate, sensual practice built on connection and communication between partners.
Background in image-making
His own biography says he took up photography as a teenager and began working as a fashion and beauty photographer in Paris in 2008, later moving into commercial film direction. Over an eighteen-year career he lists editorial work for international fashion magazines and campaigns for luxury and consumer brands. Alongside that work he makes fine art, and the same page lists exhibitions in Vienna, Paris, Brussels and Zug and a large presentation of his Metamorphic Sculptures at Kühlhaus Berlin in October 2022.
Path into rope
On a page about his rope journey he dates his first contact with shibari to about ten years before 2026, after he moved his base from Paris to Berlin. He writes that he discovered Schwelle7, the Berlin space founded by Felix Ruckert, and its performances, and first booked professional riggers to make shibari photographs. Watching them work, he came to see the rigger’s deliberate placement of rope as the artistic core of the image and began to tie himself.
He names Nicolas Yoroi as his first teacher and describes Yoroi’s style as minimalist, organic and based on movement. He also credits the contemporary shibari of Felix Ruckert, which he encountered at IKSK in Berlin, and says he studied with Hajime Kinoko, whose view of rope as a medium of transformation he shares, though he applies it to the human body rather than to installations. He says he has attended the EURIX rigger and model exchange twice a year since 2023, and he describes his own approach as a combination of the many styles he studied.
Shibari Studio Berlin
The studio’s calendar centers on small-group “Tantric-Shibari” workshops for couples and friends, in a beginner level and a follow-on level, along with private sessions for individuals or couples. In the solo sessions the guest is tied in a meditative setting; in couple tuition both partners learn to tie and to be tied. The studio also runs Shibari Life Drawing evenings at which he and the model Dorcara perform slow rope sequences for participants to sketch, and it publishes a free beginner tutorial on the single column tie as the first part of an online series. His event pages state that he is not a therapist and that the sessions are not a substitute for psychotherapy or medical care.
Performance and art
He performs with Dorcara and offers contemporary shibari performances, participatory life-drawing formats and a commissioned piece that combines rope, body and plaster casting. Among selected venues and collaborations his site lists the HIVE and EURIX festivals, KitKatClub, Libidoh in Berlin and Zürich, Club OST and Cabaret Cravache. The EURIX page lists Dan Carabas and Dorcara among the presenters of its autumn 2026 edition. In his sculptural work he uses rope to shape bodies for plaster casts, a project he relates to themes of transience and impermanence.