You are kindly invited to the workshop taking place at Škuc Gallery from 7 December until 10 December and for the opening of the exhibition on Friday, 12 December, at 7 pm!
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Artists: Lundstrom & Bro
Curator: Tia Čiček
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Covers is a large-scale, process-based artwork by the artist duo Lundstrøm & Bro – Naja Lundstrøm and Cilja Bro – whose practice unfolds at the intersection of art and social practice. The work explores how shared material processes can become both aesthetic expressions and political acts, examining how the act of making-together can also mean caring, protecting and resisting.
The work takes the form of a monumental textile installation composed of around one hundred donated duvet covers collected from LGBTQ+ people across the world. Each cover carries traces of life: the weight of bodies, the warmth of sleep, the texture of everyday existence. Sewn and assembled into a continuous surface over one hundred metres long and four metres high, the installation envelops the walls of Škuc Gallery, forming a bodily architecture that both holds and shelters those who enter it. Through its physical scale and material presence, the work gestures toward a quiet rebellion against the structures that have historically sought to control and constrain life, identity and diversity. This paradoxical combination of vulnerability and materiality lends the piece a performative gravity, where the personal is transformed into collective action, and the intimate becomes political through its embodied insistence in the space.
A duvet in itself carries the symbolic meaning of protection, something that warms, covers and shields the body at its most vulnerable. In Covers, this intimate function is unfolded on a collective and spatial scale. By assembling the individual covers – each a representation of a life – into one monumental whole, the work redefines the meaning of protection. What was once individual and concealed becomes a shared surface, a public declaration of solidarity and survival. In this way, Covers transforms the private into the collective, turning vulnerability into a shared strength.
Covers emerged through open workshops in Denmark and Slovenia, held in the artists’ own home, at Bornholm Art Museum and at Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana. Here, people of different ages, genders, identities and backgrounds – both from within and beyond LGBTQ+ communities – come together in a shared process where action, conversation and decision-making weave into a unified aesthetic expression. Each workshop functions both as a studio and as a social space, forming the methodological and political core of the piece, where participation materialises as form. Each stitch carries a material trace of the collective process that gradually shapes the structure and meaning of the work.
In this process, participation is not simply inclusion but method. The material and embodied work with textiles constitutes a way of thinking-through-making, where aesthetics arises through relations – through hands, materials and words.
The donated duvet covers also serve as an affective and material archive embedded within the work’s presence. They preserve stories that might otherwise disappear: accounts of love, loss, joy and endurance across gay, trans and other LGBTQ+ lives. Through the act of sewing, a living archive of shared experience takes form – a textile testimony to the existence of minorities that challenges dominant narratives and affirms the political potential of affect, material practice and collective experience.
Covers insists that the rights of minorities cannot be generally separated from human rights as such, and that the right to difference is fundamental to democratic values. When LGBTQ+ experiences and narratives are given space within a collective and public sphere, the very ideas of equality, freedom and community are reinforced – the principles that form the foundation of a vibrant democracy.
Ultimately, Covers articulates participation as an aesthetic and political gesture – an understanding of art as a situated, collective and temporal field in which meaning is produced through shared presence and material engagement.
Lundstrom & Bro
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Naja Lundstrøm, educated at the Funen Art Academy and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and Cilja Bro, lecturer and Master of Arts in General Education, are a couple and an artist duo who have worked together under the name Lundstrom & Bro since 2022. Their collaborative practice unfolds at the intersection of art and social practice. With an idea-based, embodied and phenomenological approach, they work with text, photography, objects and textiles to explore how social, cultural and political structures shape identity, gender and freedom of movement. Central to their work is a sustained engagement with collective processes and participatory forms of making. They create spaces where shared aesthetic production becomes a form of resistance, transforming everyday gestures into expressions of solidarity and visibility. Lundstrom & Bro also engage with archives understood as affective and material repositories that record and transmit stories that might otherwise remain untold. Through acts of sewing, writing, collecting and assembling, they build living archives that preserve traces of everyday life, desire and community, transforming private materials into shared narratives of resilience and belonging.
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English proofreading: Arven Šakti Kralj
Slovene proofreading: Inge Pangos
Design: Lea Jelenko
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The Škuc Gallery programme is supported by the Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Ljubljana.
