What We Leave Behind, Sydney Festival, 2025

‘What We Leave Behind’ is a bamboo art installation that invites reflection on legacy, collective agency, and the stories we carry forward. Created for the 2025 Sydney Festival under the theme Birth, Destiny and What We Leave Behind, the project was inspired by the idea that each of us contributes, consciously or not, to a shared social and ecological future. The artwork physically and symbolically weaves together individual hopes, memories, and aspirations into a shared public space.

Made from 500 locally harvested bamboo poles, split into over 2500 flexible strands, the installation formed a 40-metre-long tunnel containing 25,000 handwritten messages. 

What We Leave Behind was hand-woven on-site in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art  Sydney, over a period of 10 days, with the help of the community. While visitors witnessed this large installation come together, they were invited to write down their thoughts directly onto the 8m long bamboo strips. These messages, inscribed in real time, became both structure and narrative, a literal fabric of shared experience.

The artwork was sited in response to its surroundings. The golden colour of bamboo echoed the heritage Sydney sandstone blocks of the MCA building, yet its material use stood in radical juxtaposition to the straight-line geometry of the museum.

The curved tunnel was designed to draw visitors through the space and display the messages on and with the curvature of the space, creating a dynamic, ever-changing shell that widens and gets taller as you walk in. At the centre, the curvature obscures the line of sight, hiding the openings, allowing the space to reveal itself as you move through it. Each person’s journey through the tunnel offered a unique perspective, a collage shaped by light, texture, language, and the shifting rhythm of text and form.

The opening of the tunnel was positioned so as to frame a view across Circular Quay towards the Sydney Opera House. Similarly, the Sydney Harbour Bridge serves as a backdrop to the work, with the bamboo arch of the tunnel reflecting the bridge's form. 

The work’s ephemeral and open-ended nature reflects bamboo’s own regenerative qualities. Bamboo, a giant grass, is ideal for large-scale installations due to its tensile strength, lightness, and responsiveness to hand-splitting and weaving. Its natural curve, paired with the inherent strength of the arch, allowed us to weave a sculptural, 5cm-thick shell, spanning more than seven metres.

One of the major challenges in the design and realisation of the work was the combination of a tight building time with extensive community participation. WWLB is a complex geometry, and was built mostly by people who didn’t have previous experience and who learnt through making. On the other side of the barrier, the supply of material was placed in the hands of the passing public. Through this people-driven production line, we discovered a balance in which the whole site operated like a giant loom.

 Ultimately, What We Leave Behind is a meditation on impermanence and interconnection - an artwork shaped by many hands, voices, and temporalities. It celebrates not just the completed work, but the process of collective making as an act of shared meaning and community expression. 

The Build

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