19/12/2025
This week in Geneva, Mimi Plange Studio and presented the Nansen Peace Tree installations at the Global Refugee Forum, created in collaboration with refugee artisans as part of the Nansen Awards.
Conceived as sculptural environments, the Peace Trees explore craft as memory, authorship, and collective ritual. Each installation translates heritage techniques-woven, embroidered, beaded, and crocheted-into contemporary forms that carry stories, journeys, and cultural knowledge across borders.
The works were created with artisans from Sudan, South Sudan, Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Burundi, including Sarah from Congo and Sunday from South Sudan, leaders within the Kalobeyei Women’s Handicraft Cooperative in northern Kenya. Their craftsmanship and teamwork along with all of the other makers and artisans informed the material language of the installations and shaped how each piece holds meaning.
The white Peace Tree for Sudan became a living surface of inscription. The first messages were written by people who have been forcibly displaced themselves, followed by handwritten contributions from Forum participants throughout the week, including High Commissioner Filippo Grandi and Deputy High Commissioner Kelly Clements. Each message formed a “leaf,” transforming the installation into a collective expression of hope amid the displacement of more than 12 million people from Sudan.
Alongside it, the Global Peace Tree gathered messages reflecting the broader reality of forced displacement worldwide.
For Mimi Plange Studio, this project continues an ongoing exploration of how design can operate as a vessel for memory, craft, and shared authorship, working with, rather than extracting from, the communities whose knowledge shapes the work.
We are grateful for our continued collaboration with MADE51, and for the opportunity to work alongside artisans whose practices remind us that peace is not an abstraction, but something built-carefully, collectively, and by hand.
Visit our stories for a glimpse into our recent workshop with MADE51 in Nairobi, where artisans across East Africa came together to share heritage techniques, pass down tradition.
