Leek! Leek! is a project developed during a three-month artist residency at Gelbes Haus in Lucerne. Through everyday walks, the city is approached as a form of poetic fieldwork.

Urban space is treated as a field of latent language. Markings and symbols drawn from public spaces, cultural sites, and everyday environments function as semi-legible signs — public yet opaque, suspended between visibility and meaning. Within this openness, agnosia emerges as a generative condition.

Situated between archive and activation, inscription and gesture, Leek! Leek! affirms walking and embroidery as accessible practices and proposes a non-hierarchical attention to the city. The position of the outsider — the foreigner — is embraced as a conscious stance: a way of seeing the familiar anew and acknowledging the sacredness of the everyday.

All visual works in the project are based on forms, symbols, and images encountered during my residency. None of the embroidered motifs originate as drawings made by me; rather, they are translations of existing visual material observed in Lucerne and in Switzerland more broadly.

Sources include:

• Technical street markings found across the city

• Logos and shop signs along Baselstrasse, alongside Dieter Roth’s Eichhof

• Votive offerings from the monastery of Maria Rickenbach

• Objects encountered at Museum Luzern

• Details from paintings by Paul Klee — Instrumente für Spiel-Musik (1937), Fish Gaze (1940), and Die biblische Schlange kurz nach dem Fluch (1940), viewed at the Rosengart Collection

• Graffiti from urban surfaces

• Motifs from the local cemetery

• Elements from the residency space at Gelbes Haus

• Domestic patterns from the duvet on my bed and a doorbell

• A mirror found on the street by Giuliana Gjorgjevski

• A decorative detail from Primeli Chalet of Simone Etter

• The work Welle 17, STIMMENBILD (2021) by Katrin Keller

The slow process of embroidering each motif becomes a time of proximity: my hand follows the gestures of another hand — anonymous or known — that once produced the form. Through manual work, I enter the visual and cultural mythology of the place. Inspired by my father, who used to transcribe sentences from texts that moved him, my project carries his words: “Να μετέχεις του μύθου με τα ίδια σου τα χέρια.”

Leek! Leek! (The pink series)

Hand stiching on heavy cardstock (300gr)

35x50cm, 30x22cm, 19x14cm

Gelbes Haus Art Residency

Nov '25- Jan '26

Lucerne, Switzerland

LEEK! LEEK! (The pink series)

LEEK! LEEK! (The green series)

LEEK! LEEK! (The orange series)