BTC is a counter-common, emerging from the heart of the genocide taking place in Gaza, comprises male and female artists/architects residing in the Gaza Strip, enduring all facets of the genocide for more than six months. They employ art as a means to intervene and artistically chronicle the gradual erosion of life within and surrounding them, crafting a creative paradox by transforming the imagery of slow demise and death into a timeless artistic expression.

The Butterfly Trace Collective was first initiated back at the end of 2022 by architect and researcher Hala Alnaji, as a result of collective artistic work within the project “Decolonizing Art and Counter-Speculation in the Gaza Strip,” which began a year and a half ago and ended with the outbreak of the events of October 7, 2024. The ongoing genocide perpetrated by the Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip, lasting for more than six months, has resulted in catastrophic consequences that have fundamentally altered the landscape of Gaza, left it as an open permissible common. The region has been transformed into an unregulated, lawless space with blurred spatial and disciplinary boundaries, inhabited by a population financially and psychologically depleted. Within this environment, the notions of public and private ownership have been distorted, and "survival" has become the central theme shaping social and spatial interactions. Gazans found themselves existing within what we might term a "Coercive commons," where they are compelled to navigate and resist such conditions imposed upon them in order to survive, where the concept of a “Coercive common” embodies the experience of inhabiting a compulsory and forced communal space, characterized by extraordinary circumstances such as scarce resources, diminished energy, limited survival options, and a singular primal law dictating behaviour—the imperative struggle for survival.

In general, BTC focuses in their work 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 of them 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 and design, the techniques of website writing, and meditation. Self and personal experience, cognitive and spatial maps, anti-maps, and others.