Drawing Gaza Back is a joint project between the librarians, artists, writers and academic researchers of the association Free Libraries - Reading in Gaza, and the Palestinian writer Safaa al-Nabahin. Safaa works everyday with children in the Hekayatna camp in Gaza, empowering them to develop their creativity and expression.
In this section, you will find the works of these children, redrawing places as they saw them before their destruction, or depicting the Gaza they imagine for the future. You will also hear their voices, describing their works and artistic visions.
The Qattan Centre for the Child (مركز القطان للطفل)
Drawing by Ghina al-Hour (غنى الهور)
The Project Charter
Drawing Gaza Back is a children’s art and storytelling project born in Gaza and in France, within the scientific and civic project Reading in Gaza - Association Free Libraries and the cultural initiative Hekayatna.
We believe that every child has the right to imagine, create, remember and tell their own story.
The project creates a space where children can express Gaza through drawing, colours, stories and imagination. We do not ask children to represent war or suffering alone. We invite them to draw the Gaza they remember, the Gaza they love, and the Gaza they dream of rebuilding: their homes, streets, schools, sea, trees, books, games, families, friends and places that live in their memory.
Our principles
Every child’s imagination and voice deserves respect.
There is no “wrong” drawing and no single way to tell a story.
Children choose what they want to express and how they want to express it.
Art can be a space for play, learning, healing, memory and hope.
We document children’s memories without reducing their experiences to images of destruction.
We protect children’s privacy and treat their stories and artworks with care.
We believe that Palestinian cultural memory can be preserved through the voices and creativity of children.
We create together, learn from one another and make space for different experiences and perspectives.
La ville de Jenin (مدينة جنين)
Dessin de Walaa Qousa (ولاء قوصة)
A young girl is holding her drawing in her hands.s
Artwork: Masha Benoist.
This illustration was created by Masha Benoist using photographs from the Drawing Gaza Back project. It portrays a young girl from Gaza proudly holding her own drawing in her hands. The drawing itself is reproduced within the illustration, paying tribute to the richness of its young creator’s imagination while also inspiring the image’s setting. Indeed, we find the sun, clouds and birds, all elements whose secrets children so often seem to hold. The use of felt-tip pens and coloured pencils is also a nod to the young girl, who made her drawing using these very same tools.
She is a children’s book and comic-book illustrator based in France. She also runs art workshops for children and their parents, while exploring alternative educational approaches.
Narrative lies at the heart of her practice. Attentive to stories, how they are constructed and the different ways they can be brought to life, she firmly believes in their transformative and political power. Informed by her background in social sciences, her work explores, in particular, narratives of memory and the possibilities of reclaiming one’s own history by telling it in the first person. She develops projects that often draw on autofiction, bringing lived experiences into dialogue with imagined worlds.
Throughout her practice, Masha Benoist seeks to meet children on their own terms, paying particular attention to their perspective, their sensibilities and the ways in which they make sense of the world.
Masha Benoist’s Instagram page: @gravure.bavure
Drawing Gaza Back is not only about teaching children to draw.
It is about creating a space where children can reclaim their voice, preserve fragments of memory, imagine their future and contribute to the cultural memory of Gaza.
Through their drawings and stories, children become not only witnesses to their time, but also creators of the Gaza they want to see.
