From the boardroom to the classroom to public space — each program pillar adapts the same core practice to a different audience.
ArnaLab designs sustainability workshops and team-building experiences that inspire meaningful action through creativity, collaboration, and local engagement.
Our programs help organizations explore environmental responsibility, circular thinking, and community impact through hands-on activities rather than traditional lectures. Each workshop is tailored to the organization's goals and may include topics such as waste reduction, biodiversity, sustainable consumption, urban ecology, ethnobotany, and creative reuse.
By combining art, science, and experiential learning, we create memorable experiences that strengthen teams while fostering a culture of sustainability and innovation. Whether held indoors, outdoors, or in natural settings, our workshops encourage participants to reconnect with nature, work together, and discover practical ways to create positive environmental change.
ArnaLab partners with schools to embed sustainability into everyday learning through curriculum design, teacher training, and educational consulting.
We believe that sustainability is not a separate subject but a lens through which children learn about themselves, their communities, and the world. Drawing on international educational experience and place-based learning, we support schools in developing programs that connect environmental literacy with local culture, creativity, and student wellbeing.
Our advisory services include curriculum development, project-based learning, outdoor education, sustainability audits, teacher professional development, and whole-school approaches that empower students to become thoughtful, responsible citizens prepared for the challenges of the future.
Our camps invite children and young people to discover the world through curiosity, creativity, and direct experiences in nature. Hosted in our garden and surrounding natural environments, ArnaLab's programs combine sustainability, science, art, storytelling, traditional knowledge, cooking, gardening, and exploration into joyful, interdisciplinary adventures. Every activity is rooted in place-based education, encouraging participants to investigate the ecosystems, history, culture, and biodiversity that exist right where they live.
Rather than simply learning about nature, children learn with nature — asking questions, experimenting, creating, collaborating, and developing the confidence to care for their communities and the environment through meaningful, hands-on experiences.
Run twice to date. The first cohort, in 2023, took place at Dom36, an independent creative-industries space in Almaty, where six children explored Kazakh ornamentation, traditional art, and national musical instruments. In 2024, the program moved to Yurt39 and grew into a full applied-learning experience for nine children: actor masterclasses in a real theatre covering communication and physical expression, music lessons, vegetarian cooking in a professional kitchen, and carpentry — repairing and restoring real furniture. Each discipline served as a lens for a sustainability principle: reuse, craft, resourcefulness, and cultural continuity.
Outcomes: Two cohorts, 15 children total, ages 8–14 — demonstrating growth from a cultural-arts introduction to a full applied-learning curriculum, and continuity of program despite a venue change.
August 3–14, 2026 · 9:00 AM–5:00 PM · English immersion · Only 8 places available
What can a traditional yurt teach us about science, nature, art, engineering, and sustainable living? A two-week immersive English-language camp where children discover the wisdom behind one of humanity's most remarkable homes. The yurt becomes the classroom as mathematics, physics, biology, ecology, history, and culture come together in a structure that has sustained nomadic life for centuries.
Every day begins with a big question and continues through experiments, exploration, storytelling, crafts, music, cooking, and outdoor adventures. Throughout the camp, children investigate the geometry and engineering of the yurt, discover the plants and animals that make its construction possible, explore sustainability through traditional ecological knowledge, improve English through storytelling and daily conversation, learn Kazakh songs and traditional games, cook together using seasonal and local ingredients, and create artworks inspired by Kazakh ornaments and nature.
Status: Running August 2026.
Art is at the heart of ArnaLab's practice. Through installations, sculpture, mixed media, participatory projects, and works created from reclaimed materials, Madina explores the relationships between people, place, and the natural world.
Her artistic practice investigates personal identity, memory, gender inequality, ecological responsibility, and connection to local landscapes and cultural heritage. Inspired by the environments and communities she works within, each project seeks to reveal overlooked stories while encouraging reflection, dialogue, and positive social change.
Whether exhibited in galleries, public spaces, or community settings, the work invites audiences to reconsider everyday materials, reconnect with local ecosystems, and imagine more sustainable futures through art.
An installation by Madina Khamitova and Anastasia Vasilkiotti, built from toilet paper rolls and repurposed banners, forming a vibrant landscape across two 2.5m × 2.5m canvases of reclaimed wood and chicken wire. The piece portrays Almaty's peaks bare in summer — a deliberate departure from the snow caps they once held year-round — using the fragility of the landscape to comment on visible climate change in the mountains that frame the city. Built entirely from discarded materials, "Mountains" pairs an environmental message with an environmental method: waste transformed into a warning about a warming climate.
A real-ram-sized sculpture on wheels, built entirely from upcycled waste materials and designed to move through a public parade. Commissioned for Almaty's city-organized Earth Day march, the piece uses discarded industrial and household waste to surface questions of environmental neglect and urban pollution in public space.
A participatory gallery installation for Women's Day, inviting visitors to write and post notes of kindness and experiences of abuse on colorful sticky notes, collectively forming a community-made artwork addressing social injustice in a public setting. Follow-up focus groups with 20 participants — interviews and circle discussions — explored how the experience affected them.
Outcomes: Commissioned by the City of Almaty for a public Earth Day march; participatory installation generated structured post-event research with 20 participants, surfacing testimony on empowerment and shared experience through art.
