For All all all’s second residency exhibition Sidsel Ana Welden Gajardo will take over Læderstræde 15 with a 50 meters long canvas runner, covered in colorful pictures made in different fabrics. The runner will drape the walls and hang from the ceilings from room to room like a storyline. When the exhibition opens it will carry a few pictures, and throughout the project’s opening period new pictures will be sewn on slowly filling the storyline out. Mapping the Displaced is a personal and collective investigation into home sickness, culture and feelings of division. Of non-Western wars and military coups, often caused by the West and the consequences they have through decades, generations and in many parts of the world. The pictures on Welden Gajardo’s runner are fragments the artist uses to piece together her own history, inspired by arpilleras – a Chilean craft tradition that se
ws forth a new history. Arpilleras were first invented during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 70ies Chile and worked as a way of breaking censorship. Since, it has become a tradition that typically women in the poorer cities uphold, selling to tourists to make money. Like in Welden Gajardo’s growing runner, these story cloths show simple, everyday scenes inhabited by symbols of political violence and oppression. The Scenes on her runner are from her coming novel that will be published on Gads publishing house in the spring of 2023. The text pieces that are translated into pictures on the cloth, will continuously be hung in the exhibition, for guests to read along in the story. In Mapping the Displaced Welden Gajardo enacts the movement that women in her family have repeated for so many years: the body crouched over the fabric, the sore hand that sews and cuts again and again. During the residency she invites descendants and artists to sew scenes from their own histories into the cloth. Through these alliances the stories are transacted collectively and concretely. The runner is made of donated and recycled materials. Its pictures are simple in their expression which is essential for the artist for whom the common work taking place is more important than the aesthetic finish of the product itself. Born in Denmark as a child of a political refugee and with her growing arpillera, Welden Gajardo tries to map the political history of violence she is made from. Survivors of torture often cope through suppression that results in the next generation losing history. Trauma can transmit and a memory made out of fragments, orally passed stories and cultural history is created. Welden Gajardo has invited Iranian musician Melodi ‘Ghazal’ Soltani to take over a room in All all all with the work Call Center for the Displaced. With this work they transform a broom cabinet behind All all all’s archive into a call center targeted towards people in Denmark who have family outside of the West. Here people with homesickness can book a timeslot at odd hours of the day and use the space’s facilities – chargers, Ipad, comfortable chairs - while they reach out to their loved ones in peace. When the call center is not being used it will be open to the public in the exhibition’s opening hours. Here you can experience a sound piece produced by Soltani, treating the ever-present translation and survival work that diasporic people like herself live with. The sound work is a ‘waiting tone symphony’ that plays against a dialogue between Soltani and Welden Gajardo. With Mapping the displaced Welden Gajardo activates a work of collective healing in collaboration with Soltani. During the residency period they will invite descendants, poets and fellow artists into their rooms to use and co-create them, whereby they intend to make conditional translation work into something common. With the exhibition project they protect and maintain the common experience of what they call a new ‘tribe’ of second generation diasporic descendants. The exhibition is supported by Augustinus Fonden, Knud Højgaards Fond and Beckett Fonden.

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