Stories of Belonging (Toronto Arts Foundation)
My Role: Arts Facilitator

For Newcomer Day Toronto, we transformed a tent at Nathan Phillips Square into a suspended sky of paper kites. Each kite was made by a visitor, and each one carried a handwritten poem. Poetry templates were printed directly on the kites, and participants wrote about their home country, their memories of belonging, and their lived experience in Toronto.

As the day went on, the tent filled with colour. Forty-five kites went up, one at a time, each hung as it was completed. By the afternoon the installation had become a visual archive of migration stories — cultural identity, resilience, and connection, written by the people who carry those stories.

The project started weeks before the event. Kseniya Tsoy and I co-curated the workshop structure, the poetry templates, and the installation design. On the day, we facilitated together: guiding participants through the writing, helping them build their kites from construction paper and craft materials, and hanging the finished poems into the growing installation.

The kite is not an accidental choice. I arrived in Canada from Nepal in December 2022, and I know what it is to carry stories with no place to put them. This workshop was a way to create that place for others — in the middle of the city, in public, on paper shaped like kites.