Dahaleez collective

In Palestine, and particularly Gaza, public and private spaces are being decimated in Israel’s genocidal war, turning them from places of dwelling and building to places of refuge or irrecuperable destruction and loss. In this context, the memory of places is a commons under threat of theft and destruction, spanning history from the distant to the recent past and daily present, while the private becomes public, and place references and names are altered and mixed. Homes have been turned into streets, streets into shelters, schools into homes, and doors are forever flung open. Yet the memories and stories of such places and spaces remain. Given the scale of the destruction, the place-memory of individual Palestinians becomes a generalized condition of remembering, to which Palestinians (should) have a right. This project seeks to recuperate ordinary places or significant landmarks through the telling and retelling of personal and public memories about them, confirming them as ‘title deeds to the land’ (taboo in Arabic) in the face of ethnic cleansing, occupation, and eviction. Dahaleez are a collective of six artists based in Palestine and the diaspora, where they have been practicing as a commons for several years and hoping to expand their collective organically. Through this project, they will produce an interactive map of Gaza containing geographically situated images, videos, writings and other artistic outputs pertaining to the memories of specific destroyed places, which hold significant collective value as well as ordinary personal attachments. These are to be available in the map both as accomplished works and as ‘raw’ materials for further engagement and use by artists in the collective, while memory materials of additional destroyed places are continuously elicited from other interested artists for public access and engagement.