Artist Sahjan Kooner reflects on their most recent project, in which they collaborated with young people aged 12-19 from Liverpool and Leigh. Produced in partnership with youth groups Global Friends, Unity Youth, Young Inspectors, and working with Wigan Museum, the project centred imagination as the most important form of technology, while reinterpreting museum collections and exploring how stories are created and shared.

To culminate the collaboration, an exhibition titled (darkforest) The Zone of Ghosts was presented at FACT from 22 May to 16 August 2026. The exhibition featured sculptural imagined artefacts, new film works, and a digital and tabletop game created with the participants.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the project? How did it come about? How did you work with the young people?

Within the project, we explored the future and, more specifically, the future imaginations of young people. Allowing young people to imagine a vision of their future in a space is really important. It’s been great to see them test out their ideas and to give them the agency to explore something together through the process of filmmaking.

The exhibition at FACT was a continuation of The Zone of Ghosts, an interactive storytelling game created by young people from Global Friends in Leigh and me, as part of a collaboration between FACT and Wigan Museum. This continuation is an inheritance of a set of ideas from a different group, and watching those ideas and objects, which were made by the first group, mutate, morph, and grow into a fictional world was a really interesting paradigm and structure to work through.

I’m going to be quite meta now, or playful… one of the things I think I’m trying to do when collaborating with young people is figure out what happened to imagination. You know, like, who gets to imagine now? What are they imagining in place of the world they’re living in? I think the big thing that I’m taking forward is the fact that there are structures that I consistently want to test out with people. This structure, with this group, was the bonfire as a method: the idea of gathering around something, talking and thinking and sharing, and making another end of the world possible together.

Seeing the young people and giving them the agency to let their fantasies evolve is probably one of the most radical things you can do now, so that they’re not tethered by rigidity, fear, or anxiety all of the time about what’s happening.

Can you tell us more about the film you made together?

The fantasy film explores what the young people would like to see and feel in a speculative future. They created their own characters, designed and made their own costumes, wrote the script and performed in the film. I think a lot of the time this sort of stuff, like filmmaking, gets dissolved into individualistic egos and things like that. Whereas, actually, this is an opportunity to show that each person gets space in that setting. I think at a very base level, we made a film as a behaviour of being together.

I also think a story is a form of technology and young people remind me of that more than anybody else does. It’s the fact that they can transmit ideas to each other quicker and more efficiently than adults do, and they pick up on things. I think that the environment of a bonfire is a perfect place for them to pick up other resonances. 

The project was presented as an exhibition at FACT. How did you present all the different strands?

The exhibition took the form of a pavilion structure with a bonfire, which had several components that unfurled over the duration of the show. It felt like an onion that you slowly peeled back to reveal more of the interior world!

The exhibition opened with a work made previously with Global Friends at Wigan Museum. That work is an exploration of the mortality of a museum, and also who owns and makes a museum. It's a question I've been sitting with. In terms of the development of the exhibition at FACT, moment one was the presentation of the digital storytelling game and the board game; moment two was the introduction of a recorded conversation around the bonfire with FACT’s learning team and me exploring the myriad of ways that decisions, processes and people shape projects and artistic inquiry. Then, moment three was a multichannel film, made with the young people, which explores the legacy of that shift from one story to another.

The exhibition was an evolving space that grew throughout the duration of its lifespan. I wanted to almost treat it like it's a life form outside of all of us, if that makes sense. So it's not just me; it's me, the young people and the youth workers, FACT’s learning team, FACT’s other teams. Like, everyone's bringing something to the bonfire… I'm really trying to test out something as well, testing out the fact that we can make something together again as people. I know we always do, but just to remind ourselves that different people hold different stories.

I think it's important to remember that stories travel across time and space, and alter us and create narrative structures for us to shape and build worlds that can be both destructive and productive. We can shape the direction of that world through conversation, dialogue and action, something called democracy. I’d just like to remind everyone that love is the greatest technology and we all make stories; therefore we all make technology.