Behind every broken spine lay the story of a broken dream. Of passions, ambitions, desires cut mid-way as these people met with an injury. But why should the richness of life pause with an accident? What if we could find the inspiration within us to get over the setback and make a fresh start?

With this as the premise, NESCAFÉ went out to work with the Beijing Novel Inception Foundation to rehabilitate, celebrate and connect these people back to life and to dreams that mattered to them once.

• Implementation

We magnified patients’ broken spines X-Ray images and juxtaposed them with their shattered dreams created of special materials and turned them into display art. We put them across the busy CBD streets on light-boxes as an open-air-art exhibition and got China’s busy people to pause, think, connect, converse and contribute towards helping spinal injury patients start their life and dreams again…

Audiences could scan QR-codes and visit the Novel Inception Foundation social platform to discover the real stories of how the patients were starting their lives again by reconnecting to their dreams.

• Timeline

08/04/2018 - 08/04/2018

• Placement

Outdoor exhibition

• Scale

3 installations

Thousands visited the art installations, hundreds of media reported the story of ‘Fresh Start to Broken Dream’, 100 million impressions were created on social media, 15 million watched the video stories and more than RMB 100,000 was generated as funds to support the re-start of these dreams.