P R E E

One image that played a big role in inspiring this installation was an old Palestinian woman in Gaza, who had been forced to move again and again, from tent to tent, and every time she did, she took her collection of plants with her in her trailer and made a little garden, a space to sit outside the entrance of her tent.

And when the person filming asked her, ‘why are you taking these plants around with you, isn’t it tiring?’, she said, ‘we will plant wherever we go, and we will rebuild whatever they destroy’.

We don’t know what happened to this woman or where she is. We hope she is safe, in as much as anybody can be safe in Gaza today. But her words planted the seed of this installation – in the midst of the hell that she was living through, she was still dreaming of the life she wanted to live, and of being free.

‘What Will We Do Without Exile?’ is a tribute to the Palestinian imagination, which stretches beyond the apartheid wall, beyond the siege, beyond all the trauma and grief, in defiance and in resistance to the occupation.

As you enter from the outside, you see a refugee tent, representing the precarious shelters that Palestinians have been forced into for generations and where more than 1.5 million people in Gaza woke up this morning, and a washing line hung with pieces of fabric died with flowers, each one representing one of the 58 Palestinian refugee camps registered with the UN (the actual number is higher than this).

And when you step inside, you step into the dream of a liberated Palestine, and are invited to imagine a future where the wall and checkpoints are gone, and Palestinians are reunited with their olive groves, where previously Israel destroyed Palestinian citrus trees and its citrus industry, but now the orchards are full of oranges and lemons again, where families that were separated are reunited, and where neighbourhoods that were turned to rubble are rebuilt and full of life once more.

(Continued in comments) @ebsil.85 @bradford_2025