Nature as Refuge

Nature as Refuge
A collective Art Exhibition curated in the Vallorcine Forest, Mont Blanc (France) For Gaza Biennial

About the project “Nature as Refuge”
This exhibition is a focused curatorial project situated within a forested environment, unfolding across multiple vantage points within the open natural landscape. It powerfully evokes the voices of six Palestinian artists from Gaza, who are physically absent yet deeply present through their work. Their contributions are translated into site-specific installations or engravings integrated within the landscape of Vallorcine.
“Nature as Refuge” does not propose a romantic return to nature; rather, it is an expression of resilience amidst the collapse of all infrastructures. Here, nature becomes an archive, a witness, and an active collaborator.

Curatorial Vision and Concept
As curator, Hala Alnaji acts as a conduit, transmitting messages, designs, and dreams from besieged Gaza to the French Alps. Each artist’s absence is honoured by translating their vision into material interventions that engage the forest as listener, host, and bearer of memory.

Artistic Statement
The artists are absent. The land is distant. Hands cannot build. The body is fragmented. But the story survives.
Within this forest-based intervention, Vallorcine Mont Blanc becomes a site that embodies and reflects the ongoing tragedy of Gaza. “Nature as Refuge” contemplates how Palestinians in Gaza, targeted with death, threatened by starvation, displaced from their land, and exiled from their tools, have been thrust into an involuntary, radical intimacy with nature. This is not a romantic gesture, but a means of survival.
The project draws upon the knowledge that Gazans were forced to reclaim in the face of genocide: burning tree branches for fuel, cleaning belongings with sand, bathing in seawater, and replacing silenced machines with bare hands. Amid the collapse of infrastructure, nature became the last sanctuary, the forest, a witness to these truths.
This intervention brings together the work of six artists from Gaza, most of whom remain under siege and cannot be present in person. Here, absence is neither hidden nor erased; it is named, inscribed, and honoured. Their contributions arrive as instructions, recordings, sketches, photographs, and voice notes, messages that cross borders, gathered and reassembled by the curator. This is not a metaphor; this is displaced art striving to survive.
In this context, the forest is not a backdrop, but an active participant. It receives the wound of each work, not as an exhibit, but as a ritual invocation, a remnant that resists closure, a dispatch sent forth, a form rooted against ongoing erasure and targeting.