
Carrying the Waves to Home
A traveling installation carrying stories of displacement
First Appearance:
Geneva, Switzerland
Co-Created By:
Christina Chi Zhang
Lauren Scott
Aya Youssef
16 storytellers from Lebanon, Syria,
Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Sudan
“Waves to Home,” a (literally) traveling installation, just made its first appearance in Geneva. This storytelling installation was created for Waves To Home, an international organization connecting displaced youth across the world through stories. The installation weighs under 36 pounds and packs into a single checked suitcase, allowing it to travel alongside the storytellers of Waves to Home, growing with each encounter.
Built in the Small Cities Lab at Lehigh University, it debuted at the Circle of Young Humanitarians at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, where it will continue its journey to other gatherings and spaces.
The structure holds fabric waves, each carrying fragments of memory about home—held, suspended, and moving together. It currently carries 16 stories from displaced youth across Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Sudan. Under the waves, visitors add their own voices, entering an expanding web of relation. Reading these stories implicates you—you become accountable to what you've heard.
In a moment when crises feel abstract and overwhelming, it offers a different proposition—not to solve, but to stay, witness, and carry each other's stories forward. Waves to Home collects stories of displacement, but more importantly, it carries a potential for all of us to become storytellers for each other. As it travels, it grows a network of people who've become accountable to each other's search for home.
















