Seçil Yaylalı

Qui, al riparo della mia anima…

2018-2019, Ameno (Italy)

textile 

 

Qui, al riparo della mia anima… is a participatory art project with asylum seekers in which the cognitive maps of their most important travels have been transformed into arpilleras.

 

Villa Cristina, an unfinished hotel built for the Olympic Games in 2006, was turned into an accommodation centre for asylum seekers in Ameno between 2015 and 2020. More than a hundred people lived there together. They reached the centre after months, even years, of travelling under very difficult conditions, crossing several countries.

Each arrived with desires, abilities, and professions and with a dream of a better and safer life: to live among the locals as ‘individuals’ carrying their stories and experiences, just like everyone else. 

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Seçil Yaylalı first met them at the centre to learn about their lives and to find out how they could come to work together. She collected a series of personal memories and stories about their trips, the places they visited, where they stayed or got stuck, what they had to do to cross the border through Italy, and how they managed to overcome their losses. 

Over time, the project developed around the idea of cognitive maps as a mental representation of these paths; they traced their movements and mapped the areas that intersected by marking and drawing them on paper. These drawings are simple yet very poetic in the way of an individual’s feelings and perspectives, which are associated with the elements of each composition. The mental maps were later transferred on textiles by the artist and some people from the group who practised tailors in their hometown.

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After a few months in Santiago de Chile, Seçil Yaylalı found out that what they created together in Villa Cristina was very similar to arpilleras. These bright and colourful textile pictures became popular under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Usually, they were made collectively by women to condemn the regime's human rights violations.