Milan

The Milan scene

Milan’s rope teaching is closely tied to one pair of teachers. Kirigami (Federico) and Tenshiko (Marta) have worked together since 2011 and have performed and taught in cities across Italy and Europe. Speaking to Il Post in 2025, Tenshiko recalled that when they started, about fifteen years earlier, there was little formal training in Italy: people who were beginning to tie swapped information among themselves or watched others at parties and copied them. Il Post dates the first Italian shibari courses to the early 2000s, and Tenshiko told the paper that the biggest wave of interest came after the pandemic.

From School of Rope to Yugen Studio

The pair opened School of Rope in 2016, as a project of their Rope Tales label. In a 2024 interview with Mentinfuga, Tenshiko explained that their first space, opened that year, was shared with other people and was needed for lessons and for events where students could meet and tie. Between 2016 and 2020 they worked from a smaller space in the center of the city, and in 2020 they opened Yugen Studio, their third space, with a large social area and a working room of 40 tatami mats.

School of Rope’s homepage says the school offers a lesson every Wednesday, with practice sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Its courses add the physical, aesthetic and psychological sides of tying to the techniques themselves, include stretching for the person being tied, and touch on Japanese history and culture. In the same interview Kirigami said that theirs was the only rope school in Milan, with other people teaching privately at home, and that they interpret rope much as it was lived in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, in the Shōwa era.

A reporter from Corriere del Ticino who watched an advanced practice at the studio described about twenty participants working in pairs on the tatami and house rules posted on a pillar: consent is mandatory, no one practices in an altered state, a safeword stops everything, and misconduct must be reported to the organizers. Kirigami told the paper that tyers need to know where to route rope away from nerves and how to recognize the signs of nerve compression, which can cause injury after a very short time.

Links with Japan

Yugen Studio puts a strong emphasis on working with Japanese teachers, performers and photographers. It has hosted several Japanese guests in Milan and runs projects in Tokyo, including a 2027 Tokyo photography workshop with the photographer Sugiura Norio and Naka Akira. The idea for a magazine came up while the pair were building the studio in 2020, and the first issue appeared about two years later; by August 2024 Yugen Studio Magazine had reached its eighth issue. The wider story of Naka-line teaching in Italy and France is told in Kinbaku in Europe.

What the city offers now

Milan offers a structured weekly course with practice nights, plus workshops with Italian and international guests, performances and photography sessions at the same venue. School of Rope’s pages are in Italian, while Yugen Studio presents its program in English. For what to expect at a first session, see What happens at a first shibari class.