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By Robert Ferry, Land Art Generator
On a small island in Fiji’s Yasawa archipelago, the village of Marou is lighting a path toward a new model for renewable energy infrastructure — one that begins not with prepackaged solutions, but rather with community, culture, and creativity at the centre of the process.
In partnership with the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI), Marou hosted a global design competition that asked an urgent question: What if solar and water systems could be co-created with those who will live with them?
The result is LAGI 2025 Fiji, a design competition that received 205 submissions from 45 countries. Now entering its second stage, two winning design teams will receive $100,000 each to develop working prototypes of their concepts. The winners were selected through an anonymous jury process led by the residents of Marou. The O by Alberto Roncelli and Ligavatuvuce by Young Kang are set to reshape not only Marou, but potentially remote communities around the world.
These artworks are designed to meet the village’s electricity and clean water needs while serving as vibrant public spaces rooted in cultural tradition. The prototypes will be exhibited in Suva in early 2026, after which one project will be selected for full-scale construction in Marou.
But the real story is not only about what is being built — but rather how. From the start, LAGI 2025 Fiji was co-designed with the residents of Marou, who gave shape to the design brief. They defined the needs, constraints, and aspirations of the project, informed by lived experience: worsening floods in the wet season, severe droughts in the dry season, and unreliable access to energy and potable water. Their aspirations included becoming a destination for tourists, providing opportunities through sustainable economic development, and ensuring that any new infrastructure would be something they would have the knowledge and the capacity to maintain.
Building on the model being developed by the Fiji Rural Electrification Fund, a United Nations Development Program initiative, the co-creation process of LAGI 2025 Fiji is challenging the conventional model of solar microgrid development that often results in failed infrastructures in remote communities who lack the ability to adequately maintain the systems over time.
Rather than enclosing technology behind fences, the projects in Marou aim to make infrastructure participatory — to turn solar and water systems into spaces of cultural gathering, celebration, and resilience.
The implications go far beyond Marou. As Fiji confronts sea level rise and increasingly extreme weather, and as the country aims for 100% renewable electricity by 2030, the lessons of this project could ripple outward. The model being tested here — of co-creation, aesthetics, and circular resource use — offers an alternative to centralised, carbon-intensive development.
In Marou, resilience looks like a solar pavilion that hosts ceremonies, a rainwater system that children can learn from, and a future where climate adaptation grows from the ground up — designed not just for people, but with them.
