The Society of Flowers
The Society of Flowers is a durational installation created in response to Refugee Week 2025’s theme: Community as a Superpower. This work explores how refugees are represented in public discourse—across news articles, government reports, and academic papers—and how these narratives shape our collective understanding of refugee experiences.
In developing this piece, I became increasingly conscious of how these texts, while often analytical or distanced, contribute to how refugee communities are perceived within wider society. Driven by a desire to challenge and expand these narratives, I turned to the metaphor of growth and transformation.
I printed the materials I had gathered—stories, reports, and analyses—and cut them into small fragments. These were then mixed into compost, allowing the words themselves to decompose and become part of the soil. From this enriched soil, I planted fourteen different flowering plants.
In this process, the paper fragments symbolize refugee stories and lived experiences, while the soil represents host communities. The two are interwoven—feeding and transforming one another. Over time, this fusion gives rise to something new: a collective blooming that could not exist without the contribution of each part.
This installation invites viewers to consider how communities grow stronger through integration, mutual nourishment, and shared experience. By embracing complexity and time, The Society of Flowers becomes a meditation on coexistence, transformation, and the quiet superpower of coming together.