Reliquary Afatasi

Reliquary Afatasi is the name Afatasi gives to the studio space that houses her metalwork. It functions as a showroom, archive, and working site for metal objects, prototypes, and experiments. The works are not presented as ordinary inventory; they are held within a focused, intentional environment where collectors and visitors enter by appointment. The metalwork is rooted in ancestry. Afatasi had been welding for six months before researching her genealogy and discovering documents connected to her grandfather’s working life. His World War I draft registration card identified his occupation in scrap steel, the same material Afatasi had already begun using in her own welding practice.

For Afatasi, this connection is not incidental. The use of scrap steel is an inherited directive, a conversation across generations. Working in the scrap yard, salvaging, sorting, and organizing materials came instinctively. No one taught her how to identify what should be saved or how to bring order to discarded metal; she recognized it as knowledge already present in the body. Through Reliquary Afatasi, the studio becomes more than a place of production. It becomes a site of inheritance, memory, experimentation, and transformation, where scrap steel is treated not as waste but as ancestral material.