Stitching Gaza: The Fabric Map of Nazeh

Stitching Gaza is a participatory cartographic artwork that transforms the Gaza Strip from a fixed geography into a living fabric of memory, loss, and collective witnessing. Developed with displaced Palestinians in Cairo after the events of October 7, the work uses textile thinking as a method of mourning, resistance, and re-mapping belonging.
At the center of the exhibition stands a large 5×1.8-metre fabric map of Gaza, produced through sublimation printing and then embroidered collectively by 14 displaced participants. Each thread represents a route of flight, a moment of rupture, or a memory of a landscape that has since been erased. The map is neither a decorative textile nor a literal navigational tool—it is a surface of testimony in which threads function as scars, knots as pauses, and stitches as acts of survival.
Over two weeks, participants gathered around the cloth, sharing stories of displacement, loss, and the impossibility of return. Through needle and thread, each person inscribed their lived geography: paths taken under bombardment, the homes they left behind, the shelters they moved between, and the emotional terrains that shaped their journey. The workshop became a site of gentle resistance, where storytelling, touch, and collective making reclaimed agency over a narrative too often abstracted by statistics and political language.
The resulting fabric map is both archive and ritual. It carries the weight of fourteen testimonies embedded in its surface, stitched in different intensities, colors, and rhythms. Some lines trace long journeys from north to south; others mark short but devastating displacements within the same neighborhood. These layers create a dense, interwoven cartography that mirrors the fragmented, accumulated trauma of Gaza’s ongoing violence.
Exhibited in Istanbul, the piece travels across borders. While the original map was produced in Cairo, its display in Istanbul positions it within a larger diaspora narrative. The work becomes a portable geography, a “Nazeh” (displaced) map carrying the memory of a land that remains under siege. In the exhibition space, the map is accompanied by documentation of the workshop, audio fragments, and process-based materials that highlight the tactile intimacy of the collective act.
Stitching Gaza asks:
How can a map hold grief?
How can fabric become a geography of return?
And what does it mean to stitch a home that can no longer be walked?
In this project, mapping becomes an ethics—a method of remembering Gaza not as a flattened territory under attack but as a lived, felt, and continuously reimagined place carried within the bodies and stories of its people.