Nazeh Exhibition: The Language of Displacement – Cairo Iteration

The Nazeh Map – Cairo Iteration is the first manifestation of an ongoing participatory cartographic project that reimagines displacement through the vocabulary of memory, embodiment, and collective spatial testimony. Conceived in the aftermath of the mass displacement from Gaza after October 7, the project emerged from intimate gatherings with newly displaced Palestinian artists, families, and community members residing in Egypt. What began as a modest meeting of storytellers, architects, and survivors gradually took shape as a counter-map—one that resists erasure by transforming lived routes of flight into a shared, physical geography.
At the heart of this iteration is a large-scale CNC-engraved map of the Gaza Strip, carved across multiple MDF panels. The engraving holds a precise yet tactile rendering of Gaza’s urban and social landscape: its roads, neighborhoods, agricultural fields, and coastline. But the map is intentionally stripped of political boundaries, emphasizing instead the memory-laden geographies of home. Participants were invited to walk on the map, interact with it, and mark their routes of displacement using colored threads, pins, and 3D-printed miniature models of destroyed buildings, shelters, cars, tanks, and tents. Through these gestures, the map became a ground of memory—an archive of steps, voices, ruptures, and returns.
The Cairo Iteration was produced during a time when narrative fatigue and emotional exhaustion dominated the displaced community. Traditional verbal storytelling often felt too heavy, too repetitive, and too fragile to carry the emotional weight. The map provided an alternative, respectful mode of expression—a spatial language capable of holding trauma without forcing it into words. Participants stood barefoot on the engraved surface, tracing with their hands or with small models the paths they had crossed during bombardment: from Beit Lahia to Gaza City, from Khan Younis to Rafah, from one temporary shelter to another. Each marker became a fragment of a larger collective story.
Installed in Cairo, the map transformed the exhibition space into a temporary geography of Gaza—a place where memory could be held, reassembled, and shared publicly. It stood alongside two additional elements of the Nazeh project: a linguistic archive of displacement expressions (قاموس نازح) and a reflection on the concept of return. Together, these components offered a layered ethnography of war-born language, embodied routes of survival, and the philosophical tension between separation and belonging.