This body of work was created during the residency programme The Invisible Trajectory in Schubertstrasse, Zürich, organised by SUAVEART, for which I was an invited artist. Centering around the home of Herianto Sulindro, an Indonesian-Chinese architect who lived in Switzerland with his wife Els and daughter Linda, this project explored the site as a family home, a living archive, and a site for artistic production. 

Kinship, 2024, 117 x 158 cm,
Textiles collected from Schubertstrasse, recycled second-hand and scrap fabric,
hand-dyed silk, linen and cotton.

Patchwork felt like a natural response to my experience in Schubertstrasse. It is a technique which echoes the fluidity and multiplicity of diasporic identities, both in its form - adaptable and born of thriftiness and creative reuse - and in the way it has been passed down through generations and across cultural traditions. For instance, Stuart Hall describes diasporic cultural identity as not 'being' but 'becoming', and Philip A. Kuhn writes of departure as connection not separation, two concepts which are embodied in the act of patchworking itself. Through stitch, you are building a whole out of parts, bringing them together in dialogue with one another, and creating something new out of something old, often with the intention that it can in turn be repaired and reinterpreted in the future.

In this way, not only is this an investigation into a fluid understanding of cultural identity, but also an alternative approach to archiving the family's life in Schubertstrasse. This piece acts as a living archive (intended to be used and felt) that acts, in the words of Chateigné and Miessen, "not as something static, a container of knowledge, but a set of materials that would talk to one another and could constantly be re-animated and put into the parallel conversation to produce new meaning and relationships.”

The quilt and accompanying zine used fabrics found in the house, from scraps of batik to offcuts from clothing and furnishings. Silk and linen are prominent, referencing Zurich's textile production history, and the cross-cultural exchange apparent in shaping the international textiles trade and, in turn, the city's industrial landscape. Hand-dyed fabrics and accompanying tetrapak prints also use materials discarded through the course of the residency (milk cartons, teabags, and avocado pits) tracing our time spent here.

The patterns spanning across the front panel of the quilt recall plants I encountered through the residency - in the house, garden, in family photos, in Herianto’s drawings, batik fabrics, and even architectural plans, as well as lines from Herianto's blueprints. These trace the significance of plants in the Sulindros' connection to a sense of cultural identity and home and in Herianto's work shaping nurturing and thoughtful private and community spaces that connected humans with their natural environment.

Colorful blocks echo the spaces of the house, drawn from Herianto's sketches made during his renovations of the Schubertstrasse home, and the original plans for the house which he used in this process, and represent the openness and generosity with which stories and space were shared with us as artists, seeking to convey the sense of love, belonging, community and permanence manifested in this house, as well asthe complexities of passing cultural heritage and memory through generations.   

It is a beautiful thing to know where you are from and have such a connection to your ancestors, as Linda has, and I really tried to capture some of this sense of kinship in the work I created.