Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli occupation has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and beyond. 10,000 people have lost their lives, men, women, and children whose hopes and dreams have been crushed to dust, countless families further torn apart.
Numbers obscure the people behind them. Palestinian designer Maha Amer's design commemorates the victims of the month of October in the visualization above. She draws on the Palestinian embroidery tradition of tatreez . Each cross stitch in the work represents an extinguished human life, all interwoven.
Tatreez is an internationally recognized Palestinian heritage rooted in the ancient Canaanite culture of the Levant. Traditionally, it was an art form primarily practiced and worn by women in the rural villages of Palestine. Each village and region had its own unique motifs and patterns, allowing a woman's embroidered thob (cloth) to tell all onlookers a story about her origins, class, and marital status.
After the forced displacements resulting from the Nakba in 1948, countless Palestinian families, along with the tatreez patterns, lost their connection to their place of origin. Yet, the art endured, eventually symbolizing Palestinian identity as a whole under occupation, in refugee camps, and in the diaspora. Therefore, embroidering, wearing, and preserving tatreez patterns today is a form of political resistance, an affirmation of Palestinian identity in the eyes of a power that seeks to eradicate it.
An exception to more public forms of tatreez is the embroidered map of Palestine, which hangs in countless Palestinian homes worldwide and is therefore primarily intended for the private sphere. In various variations, the ancient patterns or the original Arabic city or village names fill the entire territory of Palestine. They symbolize the collective striving for the right of return, for a home that was taken from them.
The fact that we see such a card at a protest in Brussels speaks to the desperation. The embroidered card is a symbol of humanity, of the right to a home, to an existence. The continued existence of tatreez and its public display is one of the many expressions of Palestinian sumud , or determination against oppression. Yet this, and countless other forms of peaceful protest, are completely ignored.
How many more deaths must occur before this mass murder ends and the decades-long cry of the Palestinians is answered?
| Amsab-ISG has previously presented embroidery as social art, with exhibitions about a Congolese artist who depicts the colonial past through embroidery and about Syrian women in the Shatila refugee camp . A new exhibition opens on December 11, 2023, featuring Chilean embroidery as a form of resistance against a dictatorial regime. History repeats itself, unfortunately. |
