Luisa Ji

One Day They Will Return is seeking resources and support to be developed into a full immersive speculative fiction paired with installations of habitable nests, sonic environments, festivals (fictional rituals), and experimental publishing (texts, instruction manuals, and posters), subverting the format of propaganda and marketing operations online and offline.

The story begins with people, generations after the birds’s disappearance, constructing massive nests decorated with anything they believe to be associated with birds as a ritual practice or movement to bring birds back to existence. Of course, as none of the people partaking in nest-building have the lived experience of birds, the story unfolds in a comically sad manner that perhaps rhymes with our current experience of losing the agency to care for an increasingly unlivable world. This speculative fiction project, “One Day They Will Return,” explores a world where birds mysteriously disappear overnight, prompting global confusion, panic, and a range of conspiracy theories leading towards a global movement of “nest-building.”

Key themes include environmental degradation, the impact of human actions on nature, societal responses to ecological crises, the spread of misinformation, and the absence of cultural and emotional depth in our society facing devastating and catastrophic events. The project will materialize in a series of short fiction accompanied by sculptural pieces, hybrid soundscapes, and printed propaganda through which audiences, in an exhibition-performance setting, can be confronted with the desperation of holding onto hope that no longer exists.