Dur­ing the famous Hong Kong protests and Umbrel­la Move­ment, so called “Lennon Walls” have spread through­out the city since 2014. As a colour­ful mosa­ic they got known around the world as a form of pub­lic protest and free expres­sion and are called the “sticky note rev­o­lu­tion”. They car­ried mes­sages about the love of free­dom, protest against the gov­ern­ment and oth­er demands.

Like those cit­i­zens and activists, our wall makes a sim­i­lar use of the pub­lic and urban envi­ron­ment as a form of cre­ative dis­play and pub­lic discourse.

Our instal­la­tion in par­tic­u­lar dis­plays non-fic­tion­al quotes, facts, images and demands expressed by peo­ple suf­fer­ing from ME/CFS and their allies online and via pri­vate mes­sages (in this case, we asked what they would like to tell the world). It also sym­bol­is­es a view into the (online) world of a bed­bound per­son with ME/CFS, which usu­al­ly stays invis­i­ble to others.

This way, we want to empha­sise the voice of this group of peo­ple, their demands as well as the per­son­al descrip­tion of an extreme­ly dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion and exis­tence, in which stay­ing alive becomes a form of protest in itself.