"I Wish for You to be Free:"
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A collective installation created with people living through ongoing war, displacement, and violence
Project Site:
Utøya, Norway, 2025
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Co-Created by:
Lauren Scott
Christina Chi Zhang
Zoya Miari
25 Participants of "Transforming Narratives"
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Firas Bali
This four-day collective installation was created on Utøya, an island marked by the memory of the 2011 terrorist attack and now reclaimed as a site of education and democratic resilience. Developed in collaboration with the Waves to Home movement and Lauren Scott, the installation invited participants—survivors returning to the island, people who traveled from Ukraine and Lebanon, those whose families remain in Gaza, and allies from across the world—to translate their personal stories of loss and struggle into a shared narrative of resistance.
The installation was intentionally messy, light-footprinted, and responsive to the site, while remaining respectful of the heavy history of Utøya. Each evening, new threads were added in direct response to the most urgent questions and reflections of the day. Prompts were designed on-site, as a way of listening to the group and to the island itself. Materials were left unsealed, meant to weather in rain and wind, so that our words could dissolve into the earth and be carried forward naturally by time.
The work unfolded as an evolving dialogue between day and night: discussions during the day, gestures of making in the evening. On the first day, I asked us to write one piece of reflection that defined us—carrying the spirits of the loved ones lost to global violence, reclaiming counter-colonial struggles within our identities, or defining our position in relation with the contemporary issues—and tied it to a thread. On the second day, we reached outward, writing about one connection made with another person or with the trees on the island, our threads beginning to bind our narratives together. On the third day, we wrote messages to those who are not with us, who would receive our thoughts as our threads decay and our words dissolve in the wind, rain, and earth. On the last day, each of us wrote a wish for others, as we leave Utøya carrying the pains, struggles, and fights beyond ourselves, bigger than ourselves. Over these days, we had grown so close, cared so deeply, that when we cast a wish for another person, we join their fight. We carry their liberation as our own. We tied these wishes to stones with golden threads—our converging lives, our entangled hopes—and cast them into the ground.
For me, this project was also an important test. Much of my work on memory-making has grappled with the aftermath of violence, but here I had to ask how it might stand with people experiencing war, displacement, and loss in the present tense. For this very reason, I do not want to use the word "liberation" lightly. For participants from Palestine, Ukraine, Lebanon, and other sites of ongoing struggle, liberation is not a concept but a demand of survival.
It felt especially heavy to hug goodbye at the end of the week, watching people I had come to care for deeply leave safety and return to lives under active attack. It dawned on me then that the threads we tied each evening were far more than symbolic gestures; they had become a visualization of the real entanglements we had formed in each other’s lives. The installation is titled "I wish for you to be free," taken from a sentence written on the last day. And I wish for you safety, until we reach liberation.
