Trace of Absence: What Remains, and How Do We Carry It?

Trace of Absence is a collective, research-based artistic project initiated and curated by Hala Alnaji, developed in collaboration with the Butterfly Trace Collective in Gaza. The project, funded by the A M Qattan Foundation, emerges from the lived reality of genocide, siege, and forced displacement in the Gaza Strip, and asks a central question: What remains when everything is under threat of erasure, and how do we carry it?
Rather than approaching displacement as a theme to be represented from a distance, the project is built from within the experience itself. It brings together 14 Palestinian artists currently living under conditions of displacement, danger, hunger, and infrastructural collapse, working across different locations within Gaza. The artists contribute not only artworks, but also raw materials, fragments, traces, and lived experiences that together form an open, evolving archive.

Project Scope and Participants
The project involves 14 artists from diverse artistic backgrounds and disciplines, working collectively despite geographical separation and extreme constraints. There is no shared physical workspace; collaboration and coordination take place through fragmented digital communication, voice notes, images, and intermittent online access.
Artists are not positioned solely as producers of artworks, but as artist-archivists, individuals who collect, hold, protect, and interpret material traces from their immediate surroundings, often at personal risk.

Project Structure and Exhibitions
The project is structured as a multi-part virtual exhibition, organized around five interconnected archival axes. Each axis functions as a thematic exhibition space within the overall project, forming a fragmented yet interconnected cartography of absence and survival.
1. Sonic Fragments
This exhibition presents sound collages composed of everyday auditory traces from displacement: children playing, cooking, radio interference, prayers, explosions, drones, ambulances, and moments of silence. These are not documentary recordings with explanatory narratives, but atmospheric soundscapes that immerse the listener in the emotional and sensory reality of daily life under siege.
2. Tactile cartographies
This exhibition brings together hand-drawn, annotated, and speculative maps created by the artists. These maps document routes of displacement, blocked passages, erased neighborhoods, temporary shelters, and imagined paths of return. Official cartography is deliberately disrupted through erasure, personal notes, memory-based markings, and fictional geographies, producing subjective mappings rooted in lived experience rather than fixed borders.
3. Tangible Archive
This exhibition focuses on ordinary objects that have survived alongside people: fragments of fabric, broken household items, soil, toys, damaged personal belongings, and remnants collected from destroyed spaces. These materials are presented as witnesses rather than symbols, carrying the marks of violence, movement, and endurance. The archive emphasizes fragility, incompleteness, and the ethics of holding what might otherwise disappear.
4. Architecture of Survival
This archive documents how Gazans adapt ruins, tents, damaged buildings, and public spaces into temporary shelters and survival environments. It captures folding, layering, reuse, and improvisation as core architectural strategies. Rather than ideal architecture, it records survival architecture.
5. Linguistic Traces (The Lexicon)
This exhibition gathers words, phrases, children’s expressions, fragments of conversations, poems, and everyday speech circulating during displacement. Language is treated as an archive in itself, shaped by rupture, repetition, loss, and survival. The collected texts reveal how new meanings emerge under pressure, and how language adapts to catastrophe.

Exhibition Format and Accessibility
The project culminates in a virtual, interactive exhibition platform, designed to reflect the fragmented nature of the archive itself. Visitors navigate between the different exhibition axes non-linearly, encountering traces rather than fixed narratives. The platform is multilingual, accessible, and intended for a wide public audience, including Palestinians in Gaza and the diaspora, researchers, artists, and international visitors.
While the virtual exhibition represents a key milestone, it is not the final stage of the project. The archive remains open-ended, intended as a foundation for future artistic research, public engagement, and potential physical exhibitions, workshops, or laboratory-based explorations.

Project Status
Trace of Absence is both an archive and a process. It documents what remains, while remaining itself unfinished, open to reinterpretation, expansion, and collective reflection. The project insists on archiving not as closure, but as an ongoing practice of attention, care, and resistance to erasure.

Curatorial Statement: By Hala Alnaji
Trace of Absence: What Remains, and How Do We Carry It?
I did not enter Trace of Absence as a curator searching for works, outcomes, or conclusions. I entered it as someone standing inside a rupture, trying to listen without demanding clarity, to hold without enclosing, and to work without asking more than what could be given.
This project was shaped from within conditions where making art is not separate from surviving. Archiving here was not a professional task; it was a lived tension. The artists were not only gathering materials, they were protecting them, carrying them across distances, keeping them from being crushed, erased, or forgotten. Every fragment was held with care because it might be the last time it existed.
What moved me most throughout this process was not what was collected, but how it was collected: under danger, hunger, exhaustion, displacement. Artistic intuition sharpened by pressure. Decisions made while walking through bombed landscapes. Moments seized quickly before disappearance. In this sense, the artists were not documenting life, they were negotiating with it, insisting that something must remain.
My role unfolded as a parallel act of holding. Holding the process open. Holding the artists’ rhythms, silences, fears, and limits. Some days, nothing could be produced, and that, too, was part of the work. The curatorial space became a space of care, where psychological states mattered as much as materials, and where presence could take the form of absence, delay, or refusal.
This is not an archive built on order, hierarchy, or neutrality. It is shaped by subjectivity, by emotional proximity, by personal geographies. The materials carry not only traces of place, but traces of the bodies that reached for them. What emerged is closer to a constellation than a system — a fragile alignment of memories, objects, sounds, and words that refuse to stabilize.
I do not consider this archive complete, nor do I wish it to be. What we have gathered is not a finished statement, but a threshold. These materials are beginnings; raw, open, unsettled. They ask to be revisited, tested, re-read, and re-imagined. They invite others to enter, not as viewers seeking understanding, but as participants willing to stay with uncertainty.
There is something deeply human in remaining attached to things when everything else is taken. Objects, fragments, sounds, and words become companions, they survive with us, and sometimes for us. Through them, we attempt not only to remember how life was, but to restore our capacity to feel, to care, and to recognize ourselves as still human.
Trace of Absence is not a project about loss alone. It is about the act of holding — holding materials, holding memory, holding one another — in a time designed to shatter continuity. It is an unfinished space, deliberately so, where archiving becomes a gesture of resistance, and care becomes a curatorial method.