Adel Altaweel, "How are your maps now?", 2025
Adel Altaweel, "How are your maps now?", 2025
In the age of digital maps, Gaza has become featureless.
That city I knew by the fine wrinkles in its alleyways.
Just as one recognizes the wrinkles in one's face in the mirror, it has become strange.
The street that ran from the north of the camp to its south was executed...yes, executed.
In Gaza...the roads are being destroyed. In Gaza...even the buildings are being destroyed.
This is an act that doesn't ask, but mocks...
It doesn't ignore, but deliberately ignores...
I am an "Arab" who asks coldly:
"How are your maps now?"
I ask from inside a room with water, electricity, and free time, with a keyboard and the internet...
As if unaware that an entire city has been erased lengthwise and widthwise.
A street with all its contents...as if it were just an update in a map application.
The maps here are not lines and colors, but documentation of erasure.
Beginning with a green canvas, the color of normal life, the color of the beginning of a Gaza morning.
The color fades to gray, then brown, then the dust of human origins.
With each painting, colors blend together to withstand this erasure (annihilation). Streets disappear,
from a populated map to empty spaces with one or two streets.
from a city fabric to a geographical void.
Maps fade as the name of the missing fades from the list of survivors.
This is not just a visual representation.
It is a sarcastic question directed at all those who naively asked...
"What have your maps become?"
And I answer: !!
This artwork was created as part of Sahab Urgent Grant Program 2025.
