“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.

The installation makes a modest proposition at a moment when crises arrive as scale and abstraction. It asks people to stay, to witness, and to carry stories forward. Waves to Home collects stories of displacement, but its ambition sits less in the stories it collects than in the possibility it holds open, that each of us might become a storyteller for someone else. As it travels it accumulates, and it has also begun to propagate: a second version is now being made in Pakistan. It made us imagine—drops of water converging, into waves to home.