Art and Architecture as Tools of Care: Reimagining Childhood, Space, and Trauma in Gaza

This research examines the role of art and spatial practices in addressing trauma among children in Gaza, developed through a series of participatory workshops conducted with displaced children in conditions of war and instability. Moving beyond observation, the study is grounded in a practice-based methodology, where artistic production—particularly drawing, storytelling, and spatial exercises—becomes both the subject and method of inquiry.
Central to the research is the development of a threefold reading framework through which children’s artistic outputs are interpreted. These readings approach drawings not merely as visual expressions, but as layered spatial and emotional documents: first, as affective registers of fear, loss, and memory; second, as cognitive mappings of space, environment, and lived experience; and third, as speculative acts through which children reimagine and reconstruct disrupted realities.
Through this lens, children’s drawings reveal complex negotiations with violence, displacement, and the loss of home, while simultaneously opening possibilities for agency and reconfiguration. The workshops function as temporary spaces of safety and collective engagement, enabling children to articulate what exceeds language and to rebuild fragmented relationships to space and self.
Rather than framing art as a supplementary therapeutic tool, the research positions it as a critical practice of survival, knowledge production, and spatial reconstruction. It ultimately proposes a methodological contribution: a way of reading children’s artistic expressions as spatial, political, and epistemic acts within contexts of ongoing catastrophe.