Renée de Sans
Berlin filmmaker and visual artist who co-founded the queer rope space Karada House in 2019, has taught shibari there since 2021 and co-directed the award-winning documentary The Artist and the Pervert (2018).
Renée de Sans is a Berlin-based visual artist, filmmaker and shibari teacher. Her work in photography, film, performance and rope deals with identity, gender, sexuality and the body, and her own site describes trans embodiment as a central theme. With Caritia and Mamana she founded Karada House in 2019, a Berlin community space for rope bondage, performance and embodied practice that centers queer and trans people.
Film and photography
Her CV lists a diploma in visual communication from the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (2007) and work as an art director before her film projects. With Beatrice Behn she co-directed The Artist and the Pervert (2018), a 93-minute documentary about the composer Georg Friedrich Haas, Mollena Williams-Haas and their consensual BDSM relationship. It premiered at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in 2018, screened in 2019 at Hot Docs, DOC NYC, Raindance and CineKink among others, and was named best documentary at the Pornfilmfestival Berlin and won the audience award for documentary at CineKink New York. Her experimental short Locked (2016) won best experimental short at CineKink New York. She has shown photographs in solo exhibitions titled Collected Works at Boutique Bizarre in Hamburg (2017) and at Karada House (2019). On her site she writes that rope, and shibari in particular, brought her back to a sense of being present in her body.
Teaching
Her CV dates her regular shibari teaching at Karada House from 2021 and a co-taught queer program, Queerope, with Sophia Rose from 2022. She names Addie Tahl, Akechi Kanna and Kagura, Caritia, Ceci Ferox, Georg Barkas, Mamana, Murasaki Haruan, Naoko and Sophia Rose among the rope practitioners she has exchanged with, alongside butō workshops with Yumiko Yoshioka and Ken Mai. Karada House lists her focus as connection and flow, with an emphasis on emotional connection and movement, and notes that she both ties and is tied. Her classes there run through the school’s rotating curriculum, from Rope for Absolute Beginners to suspension sessions under Rope in the Air, harness classes such as a gote session, and a rope lab on three-dimensional rope; several late-2026 sessions are co-taught with Liebre Azul. She also gives private lessons and private rope sessions.
Outside Karada House she taught Tie Me Up with Caritia at the Natural Instincts Festival in Stuttgart (2025), workshops at TAZ Lab in Berlin with Mamana (2025) and Mariana Luna (2026), and QuIRKS at Studio Allegory in Vancouver with Mamana and Sophia Rose (2026). She was an international special guest at the fourth Bogotá Shibari Week in 2026. Workshops planned in Beirut in 2023 were cancelled, which her CV attributes to censorship.
Performance
Her performances include Trans*mutation, which her CV describes as a hook suspension performance about trans embodiment and transformation, shown at a Karada House opening in 2023; Room 916, a site-specific shibari series for the eleventh anniversary of the 25hours Hotel Bikini Berlin (2025); a public Renbaku Salon at Karada House with Murasaki Haruan and Naoko (2025); and a variety show in Bogotá with Liebre Azul (2026). Her online journal includes a piece on kinbaku history titled “Who Was Kise Sahara?”.