Nazeh Map – Hamburg Iteration FIRE Exhibition, St. Nikolai Memorial, Hamburg, 2026

Nazeh is a long-term participatory cartographic project that began in Cairo in 2023 in response to the mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. Since then, it has continued to evolve across different locations, with each iteration engaging a new geography, community, and set of questions around memory, displacement, and belonging. After Cairo and later Ghent, the project now arrives in Hamburg at the St. Nikolai Memorial. At its core, Nazeh is concerned with mapping not only places, but also the emotional, social, and political traces left by displacement. It asks how people continue to carry place when place itself becomes inaccessible, fragmented, or transformed. The connection to FIRE is immediate for me. As a Palestinian from Gaza, fire is not an abstract element or metaphor. It is something that has shaped our landscapes, homes, memories, and daily lives. Fire marks destruction, but it also leaves behind traces. It reveals what was there, what has been lost, and what stubbornly remains. In the context of this exhibition, I am interested in fire as a force that simultaneously erases and exposes. While violence seeks to destroy places and sever people's relationships to them, it often makes those relationships even more visible. The more a place is threatened, the more urgently it is remembered, narrated, and mapped. Presented within the ruins of St. Nikolai—a site that carries its own history of destruction and survival—Nazeh enters into a dialogue about what remains after catastrophe. The work is not only about loss; it is also about the persistence of memory, the resilience of communities, and the continuous effort to reconstruct meaning from what survives the fire. In an unexpected way, the building itself became part of the work. As particles from the ceiling settled onto the surface of the map, they resembled ash. I decided to leave them there. Whether ash, dust, or fragments of time, they created a material connection between two landscapes marked by destruction. The memorial carries the memory of fire from another historical moment, while the map carries the memories of Gaza. For me, these traces transformed the installation into a conversation between different histories of loss, survival, and remembrance.