My Wish for the Future of Amsterdam
“Bonds per Stitch – Here, Where Threads Remember, We All
As Amsterdam marks 750 years of history, we are invited to dream of what lies ahead. My wish is for a future Amsterdam where everyone especially immigrant women is not only welcomed but recognized as an essential voice in shaping the city’s story. A place where belonging is not granted from above, but made together, stitch by stitch.
My project, Bonds per Stitch, was born from this vision. It is a participatory textile practice rooted in the Indian tradition of Godhari quilting, developed through intimate collaborations with immigrant women in Amsterdam. In quiet, one-on-one “quilt talks,” we gather discarded fabrics and memories to co-create soft archives of care, history, and resistance. At its heart, the project asks: What does it mean to belong? Who gets to tell the story of a city?
This question becomes even more urgent in a time marked by rising nationalism and the silencing of migrant narratives. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City (1996), which argues for the reappropriation of urban space by its inhabitants, my wish is for a more inclusive Amsterdam one that moves beyond symbolic multiculturalism and embraces shared cultural authorship. Lefebvre called for citizens not just to inhabit the city, but to shape its social and symbolic life. This remains a radical and necessary invitation.
In the layered fabric of Amsterdam’s urban identity, immigrant women are often woven in silently present, yet invisible. Bonds per Stitch seeks to change that by making visible the emotional geographies of home through collaborative quilting. Each woman produces a quilt reflecting her memories and longings. In turn, I respond with a corresponding quilt shaped by our shared dialogue. Together, we
Find Home
”
create a co-authored textile narrative one that honors multiple perspectives and gestures toward mutual belonging.
Drawing from sociologists Boccagni and Fathi, who conceptualize home as a mobile, affective, and socially constructed experience, this project approaches home not as a structure, but as something formed through relationships, gestures, and spaces of care. In this way, the act of stitching becomes both method and metaphor a soft yet insistent intervention into the masculinized, institutional cityscape. Each thread says: We are here. We remember differently. We belong.
My wish is for an Amsterdam that sees these contributions not as peripheral, but central. A city where culture is not just presented in museums, but shaped in living rooms, community centers, and quilt circles. Where care is as valued as innovation, and storytelling is seen as civic infrastructure. Amsterdam has always been a city of trade, migration, and exchange. Its richness lies in its diversity. My hope for its next 750 years is that it embraces not dominance but reciprocity, not erasure but deep listening. That quilting, caretaking, and memory-making are understood as political, spatial, and cultural acts.
Above all, my wish is simple: that Amsterdam becomes a city where no one is a guest. A place where to belong is to be heard in one’s full, layered, beautiful complexity. A city tenderly stitched together by all of us.
Regina Kelly, with a heart divine, She journeys where worlds and souls align.
Home is not past, but present in her stride,
In every moment, she feels it inside. Generations of change, yet she remains free, For home is the now, where her spirit can be.
Her mother left the land of home, yet roots remain,
That place still whispers in distant rain.
A mother now, with arms so wide, Holding past and present side by side. Through stories, songs, and threads of time,
She keeps the homeland’s echoes alive.
Neyde paints fire in the colors of fight, A rebel soul burning bright. Home is mother, tender and true, Home is love in crimson hues. Now she dreams across the sea, A distant heart calls, wild and free.
Mo Chen dreamed beneath the ancient wall, Footsteps tracing stories vast and tall.
A world beyond the bricks she sought, Carrying home in the love she brought. Through every frame, her past remains, A family of four in light and rain.
