Elena Goded Rambaud trained as a biologist, holds a doctorate in Philosophy and Educational Sciences, spent decades as a university professor, and arrived — perhaps as the most natural consequence of all that came before — at founding one of the most singular and celebrated textile craft projects in Spain.

Elena Goded graduated in Biological Sciences at a time when scientific and artistic ways of seeing were still considered separate territories. Her life’s work brought them together. For more than twenty years she was a tenured professor at UNED, Spain’s national distance-learning university, where she directed the Textile Craftsmanship course from 1990 to 2010, educating generations of teachers in the knowledge of fibres, dyes and the trades of the loom. In parallel, she taught courses at various universities on natural dyeing, applied botany and the history of dress — a crossroads between science, history and material culture that few had explored with such intellectual rigour.

This work in the classroom led her to publish foundational texts for the teaching of textile craft, among them The Textile Workshop in the Classroom: Natural Dyes and The Textile Workshop in the Classroom: Weaving, both published by UNED and still essential references in their field. Her precision as a researcher and her ability to convey the value of the crafts made her an authoritative voice in the Spanish artisan tradition.

The store of knowledge accumulated over those decades found, from 2005 onwards, an unexpected stage. That year, Elena and her husband acquired the ruins of the Cistercian monastery of Santa María de la Sierra, in Collado Hermoso, Segovia. It was not a considered plan — it was, as she tells it, an encounter. “I did not seek out the monastery. It was the monastery that found me.” What followed was a long and demanding commitment to the restoration and consolidation of the abbey’s remains, which had fallen into advanced abandonment.

It was on that same ground that Ábbatte was born, in 2013 — its name drawn from the Latin word for abbey — co-founded with her daughter Camila Lanzas, art historian and designer. The firm represented the convergence of everything Elena Goded had cultivated throughout her life: scientific knowledge of fibres and pigments, a historical understanding of textiles as cultural objects, a vocation for teaching, and a deep rootedness in a particular place and landscape. Ábbatte was not a professional reinvention. It was a synthesis.

Recognition followed swiftly. In 2015, Ábbatte received the National Crafts Prize in the Entrepreneurship category, awarded by Spain’s Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism. In 2017, the project was distinguished with the Hispania Nostra Prize for Good Practice in the Conservation of Cultural and Natural Heritage — an award that explicitly acknowledged the work of recovering the monastery and returning it to productive life.

Elena Goded’s reach within the world of contemporary craft extends well beyond her own company. In 2018 she became one of the founders and president of SACo, the Sociedad de Artesanos Contemporáneos — an association bringing together Spanish designers and artisan companies under criteria of excellence and contemporaneity, with the aim of establishing quality craftsmanship as a cultural and economic benchmark of the first order. SACo has since developed projects of national and international visibility, including collaborations with Mazda during the Madrid Design Festival. The Fundación Juan March, at its Palma venue, has also hosted lectures by Elena Goded on artisan textiles and their philosophy, placing her work firmly within the wider circuit of contemporary Spanish culture.

Today Elena Goded runs Ábbatte from the Segovian monastery, alongside Camila Lanzas and a team of local weavers and craftspeople. Her presence embodies something that has grown rare: coherence between thought and practice, between research and the made object, between tradition and a genuinely contemporary proposition. At a moment when craft is once again being claimed as a cultural and environmental answer to the excesses of industrial production, Elena Goded has spent decades building exactly that — with patience, and with rigour.