Home-making

Home-making begins with the body entering an unfamiliar place. After relocating, the artist started sensing new environments not through language or orientation, but through walking, breathing, touching, and collecting. During meditative hikes through Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Karlsruhe, and Berlin/Brandenburg, sample plants were gathered and carried home as quiet companions - fragments of landscape slowly embedded into daily life and the first attempts to feel at home.
In a new environment, the body becomes the primary site of negotiation. It carries memories, habits, and gestures shaped by former landscapes and traditions. In the narrow space between what is already imprinted and what is newly encountered, friction arises, followed by layering. Old and new experiences do not erase one another but coexist, accumulating as sensations and embodied knowledge. This in-between space forms the core of the project.
Drawing on Central Asian textile traditions from her land of origin, Tajikistan, the artist approaches newly encountered flora through the symbolic language of suzani and zardozi embroidery. Traditionally, these collective practices encode local plants into motifs carrying social and emotional meanings. In this work, the artist re-catalogues plants collected during her walks, developing new symbols shaped by bodily perception, movement, and emotional states.
The work takes the form of a textile installation made of soft silk cushioned with cotton - a plant deeply tied to the artist’s country of origin. Resembling a soft blanket or quilt, the piece evokes comfort, protection, and care. Each section of the textile collage represents a stage of forming attachment, translating movement, memory, and landscape into tactile form.
Home-making reflects on migration, belonging, and the body as a carrier of home, asking how comfort and familiarity can be rebuilt through attentive movement, material practice, and the creation of new meanings within unfamiliar spaces.