Gestalta
Berlin-based shibari artist, performer and teacher who came to rope in 2007, wrote a 2019 guide to suspensions and has run the Berlin studio Daruma since January 2024.
Gestalta is a shibari artist, performer and teacher based in Berlin. Her own site says she came to rope out of curiosity about borders and has worked with it for almost twenty years, both tying and being tied. Her CV dates her first contact with shibari to 2007 and her first rope performances to around 2009, and records many years of professional work as a rope model for riggers in Japan and Europe.
Approach
She describes her tying as a blend of several Japanese rope traditions, shaped by her training as an artist, her research into butoh and her roots in the BDSM scene. Her site presents rope as something that resists tidy categories and works best where art, sexuality, philosophy and human connection overlap. Her teaching, as she describes it, centers on the particular body she is tying: how it moves and what it needs. She teaches movement, fluidity, reading the body and pacing, and encourages students to build a practice of their own. She also holds an MA in Fine Art from the University of Leeds, completed in 2022.
Performance
Her CV lists appearances at international shibari festivals in London, Sydney, Berlin, Prague, Rome, Moscow, Helsinki and Tallinn between 2009 and 2026. Among her selected performances are a 2015 piece at the Akechi Denki tenth anniversary memorial in Tokyo with Pedro Diniz Reis, a 75-minute work titled Shibari at Culturgest in Lisbon in 2016, a keynote and performance at an Intimaterial symposium at the Royal College of Art in London in 2017, and Mayfly, made with Shantel Liao in Berlin in 2019. In 2022 she performed Jardín Salvaje, a butoh and shibari piece, at Espacio Nōs in Barcelona.
Teaching and Daruma
In May 2019 she published Shibari Suspensions: a step by step guide, which she sells directly. Since January 2024 she has owned and run Daruma, a dedicated shibari studio in Berlin-Neukölln, where she teaches regular classes, private lessons and workshops and hosts a weekly rope jam. Daruma’s curriculum page says she designed its six-week Step 1 to Step 3 courses so that they follow one coherent logic, taking beginners as far as attaching suspension lines and simple partial suspensions. She takes a limited number of teaching bookings outside Berlin.