Coercive Common Project

Coercive Commons
Coercive Commons is the culmination of an initiative launched by the Butterfly Trace Collective in response to the events of 7 October 2023 and the genocidal violence that has since unfolded in the Gaza Strip. The catastrophic consequences of this violence have radically transformed Gaza’s spatial, social, and material conditions, producing a territory in which boundaries have become unstable, systems of ownership have been disrupted, and distinctions between public and private space have been profoundly distorted. Within this devastated landscape, people are physically and psychologically exhausted, resources are depleted, and survival increasingly determines the ways in which space is inhabited, negotiated, shared, and contested.
The project describes this condition as a “coercive commons”: a form of common space into which people are forced rather than voluntarily gathered. It is a commons produced through displacement, destruction, enclosure, scarcity, and the continuous struggle to survive. Those inhabiting it must constantly negotiate its unstable conditions, improvise within them, and find ways of enduring a spatial order that has been imposed upon them.
Coercive Commons examines what it means to live within such involuntary and exceptional forms of commoning: environments shaped by extreme scarcity, exhausted capacities, limited possibilities for survival, and a social reality increasingly governed by the immediate imperative to remain alive. At the same time, the project moves beyond documenting this imposed condition. It looks at the practices through which people attempt to regulate, circumvent, repair, and survive the coercive commons, and at how some of these practices may gradually develop into forms of counter-commoning: collective structures of care, exchange, mutual support, improvisation, and resistance created from within conditions of devastation.
At the centre of the project is the Butterfly Trace Collective, whose members include artists living in the Gaza Strip and experiencing the ongoing destruction directly. From within the coercive commons itself, they use artistic practice as a means of intervention, witnessing, and documenting the slow erosion of life around and within them. Their work produces a critical contradiction: the conditions of destruction and gradual death are transformed through artistic practice into images, objects, narratives, and forms of knowledge capable of enduring beyond the moment of their production.
The project also involves Palestinian artists displaced to Egypt who survived the conditions of war and forced displacement in Gaza. Working with documentary materials, testimonies, narratives, and artistic contributions produced in Gaza, they develop their own interpretations and artistic responses, extending and transforming these materials through different forms of production. Coercive Commons therefore operates as a geographically dispersed collaborative cultural practice, connecting artists working from within the Gaza Strip with displaced artists working from Cairo, Egypt.
Rather than treating Gaza solely as a site of destruction, Coercive Commons examines the social and spatial practices that emerge when ordinary systems of living have been violently dismantled. It asks how collective life is reorganised under coercion, how people create temporary structures of survival within extreme conditions, and how art can document, translate, and participate in the formation of alternative commons amid ongoing devastation.