One Life, One Love — the gathering on open water
Polen Cerci
Polen’s Notebook · My Graduation Project · A Future Ancestor Project
In my final year of architecture school in Cyprus, my professors gave me one brief: design a temple for a single religion. I could not choose one. So, at the risk of failing the class, I drew a floating world for forty-eight faiths, out on the open sea.
I called it One Life, One Love. I have carried it for twenty years, a home built to unite the people of the planet, for the ones who come after us.
by Future Ancestor · Polen Cerci
One religion would have left everyone else outside. I could not build a house of peace with a door that opened for only some of us.
So I gathered forty-eight, as many belief systems as I could hold, and gave each one the same place at the same table.
I set it on the water beside Famagusta, off the closed quarter the Turkish Cypriots call Maraş and the Greek Cypriots call Varosha, the fenced ghost town left behind when the island split.
Cyprus is one place that once lived together. Greek Cyprus and Turkish Cyprus, divided by conflicts of nation, religion, and language. I placed my project in the sea between the two, where the border dissolves.
For me the water carries the whole meaning. The sea is our collective consciousness, deep and shared, and it holds no borders, not between countries, not between nature and us.
The bubbles are us. Small, floating, impermanent pieces of that deep knowing, each of us reading it in our own way and calling it faith.
Every bubble holds a residence, a belief system with its own values and its own emotions. People come representing where they are from and what they hold sacred, and for a season they live side by side.
Identical domes, lit from within, gardens under the shells. No belief raised above another. No ego. Yes to peace.
At the center is the media center. It is there to show us how we get along, how we can find what we have in common while each of us stays fully ourselves. Peace on earth starts with something simple, getting familiar with one another.
We were built for small tribes, to know about a hundred and fifty people. Anything that did not look like us read as a threat. That kept us alive once. But we live in a different era now, and we can find common ground, a more universal understanding. Not everything will be perfect. We have to start somewhere.
I solved the whole structure. Every bubble, every connection, the entire system for holding it afloat, drawn and resolved in AutoCAD.
Building it was another matter. Back then it was almost impossible to make, and the money it would take was far out of reach. But I worked all of it out on paper. The drawings are real, and they have been waiting ever since.
The film · in her words
A project like this would cost a hundred million dollars, and far more. When I drew it, I had no way to build it, only the conviction that it should exist.
Years after my thesis, I found The Seasteading Institute, founded in 2008 by Patri Friedman with early backing from Peter Thiel, proposing permanent floating communities on the open sea. Something close to what I had already drawn, arriving years after I put mine on paper. It told me the dream was real, and that it was shared.
All that was missing was a way to begin, and maybe now there is one. It could rise virtually at first, with AI at the center as an egoless mediator that listens and helps us find peace instead of pulling us apart, working from clear ethics and holding no belief above another. I have carried this for twenty years. I just need the people bold enough to build it. Maybe this is finally the time.
I think of this as a future ancestor project. I am building it for the people who will inherit the earth after me, drawing the room I hope they will one day walk into. One life, one love, one planet, together.
One Life, One Love · a Future Ancestor project by Polen Cerci
Write to me© 2026 Polen Cerci. “One Life, One Love,” its writing, drawings, and images are the original concept and intellectual property of Polen Cerci, Artist & Architect. All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced, reused, or built from without written permission.
