Butterfly Trace Initiative BTI
Egypt
Literature,Visual Arts,Cultural Management,Architecture and Urbanism,Design,Knowledge Production and Research,Sociology,Audio Production,Archiving
Butterfly Trace Collective is an unregistered group of Palestinian artists and architects who began working collectively under this name at the beginning of the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip. Its establishment dates back to the end of 2022 as a result of collective artistic work within the project “Decolonizing Art and Counter-Speculation in the Gaza Strip,” which ended with the outbreak of the events of October 7, 2024. The group includes 20 artists, whose work focuses on presenting critical artistic practices to the reality of communal experiences through a real act of revealing the hidden, invisible patterns of daily life that are passed over without a point of stopping or contemplating. The spaces targeted by the “Butterfly Trace” are drawn from personal experiences; Some have spatial coordinates and others embody a social or imaginary space, but they all provoke the underlying reality in which we live and place it on a platform of investigation and disclosure. In its work, “Butterfly Trace” adopts an approach based on thinking about the mechanisms of digging deep into the hidden layers within the society around us, along with ways to decolonize and enhance alternative learning sources produced by society and the commons. “Butterfly Trace” uses the tools and techniques of research, design, and website writing, self-reflection and personal experience, cognitive and spatial maps, anti-maps, and others.
Butterfly Trace Initiative BTI
Egypt
Literature,Visual Arts,Cultural Management,Architecture and Urbanism,Design,Knowledge Production and Research,Sociology,Audio Production,Archiving
Butterfly Trace Collective is an unregistered group of Palestinian artists and architects who began working collectively under this name at the beginning of the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip. Its establishment dates back to the end of 2022 as a result of collective artistic work within the project “Decolonizing Art and Counter-Speculation in the Gaza Strip,” which ended with the outbreak of the events of October 7, 2024. The group includes 20 artists, whose work focuses on presenting critical artistic practices to the reality of communal experiences through a real act of revealing the hidden, invisible patterns of daily life that are passed over without a point of stopping or contemplating. The spaces targeted by the “Butterfly Trace” are drawn from personal experiences; Some have spatial coordinates and others embody a social or imaginary space, but they all provoke the underlying reality in which we live and place it on a platform of investigation and disclosure. In its work, “Butterfly Trace” adopts an approach based on thinking about the mechanisms of digging deep into the hidden layers within the society around us, along with ways to decolonize and enhance alternative learning sources produced by society and the commons. “Butterfly Trace” uses the tools and techniques of research, design, and website writing, self-reflection and personal experience, cognitive and spatial maps, anti-maps, and others.
Grantee
Reclaiming Our Commons: A Proposal for Cultural Collaboration Across the Arab Region
2024
Coercive Common
The Butterfly Trace Initiative is a collective of Palestinian artists and architects and a collaborative cross-border cultural exchange between those residing in the Gaza Strip and those currently displaced to Egypt (Cairo). The collective was initiated in response to the events unfolding since 7 October 2023, and the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the Israeli occupation in Gaza, transforming it into an unregulated, lawless space with a financially and psychologically depleted population. Within this environment, Gazans found themselves experiencing a “Coercive Commons,” namely inhabiting a compulsory and forced collaborative space with others, under the extraordinary circumstances of scarce resources, energy shortages, limited options, and the only remaining primal law dictating their behavior—the imperative struggle for survival. The project explores methods to formalize, document, and narrate the practices of coerced communal living, to transcend the constraints of its coercive circumstances and give rise to alternative communal spaces, or counter-commons. While the artists who still endure the genocide will employ art as a means to intervene on and artistically chronicle the gradual erosion of life within and surrounding them, the artists in Egypt who have for now escaped the atrocities will engage through their unique perspectives and various artistic forms with these narrations and documentations.