Stitch & Subvert: Re-Mapping Jyväskylä Through Needle & Thread

This series explores mapping as an artistic method for reading the city beyond its official representation. Developed through a sequence of workshops and collective mapping sessions in Jyväskylä, Finland, the works are informed by conversations with residents, personal testimonies, and participatory stitching practices in which different communities inscribed their memories, observations, and critiques onto shared map of the region.
Rather than treating the map as a neutral tool, the series approaches cartography as a field of interpretation where spatial decisions, ecological relations, and lived experiences intersect. Through abstraction, the works translate these layered encounters into visual systems that question how urban space is shaped, inhabited, and remembered.
The series unfolds through three modes of cartographic inquiry: power, ecology, and memory.
The first work adopts a language of surgical cartography, tracing moments where planning decisions altered the physical and social fabric of the city. The second moves toward ecological cartography, highlighting the distributed networks of forests, waters, birds, and landscapes that generate a sense of belonging beyond administrative borders. The third enters the terrain of archival abstraction, revealing the hidden layers, traces, and overwritings through which the city records its own transformations.
Across these works, mapping becomes both a critical and poetic act. Lines, fragments, and abstractions operate not only as representations of territory, but as instruments for examining the tensions between authority, ecology, and lived memory within the urban landscape.