Where do we run when the earth shakes?

Embroidery on 6 keffiyeh

Where do we run when the earth shakes? is a monument that intends to immortalize the 1415 Palestinians who were massacred in the Gaza Strip between December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009 by the Isra*li settler colonial regime. 1415 names were hand embroidered across 6 black and white keffiyehs. 

The black threads on the keffiyehs were removed to create a space for each individual denied their right to life en masse. The stitching of each name in red bears witness to their existence and to eternally declare a space in the world for them. The names were embroidered without attention to the binary social categories that mark them as male or female, adult or child, employed or unemployed, and militant or civilian. Categories assigned that exploit those most vulnerable to state sanctioned violence by implying that although the dead includes victims worthy of sympathy, the dead also includes some who were villainous and deserving of condemnation. 

The removal of the black threads serves as a form of protest against the media’s euphemistic framing that seeks to normalize Palestinian death by distorting the power inequities that exist. The stitching in red rejects the systematic erasure of the 1415 Palestinian lives reduced to a single number that accumulated into a 4 digit “death toll”.  

The act of unstitching and stitching, of clearing space to claim space spanned over the course of 7 years. The 1415 individuals who were murdered in 22 days necessitated 7 years of slow, intentional and repetitive movements to preserve their names. Each person’s name was held in a ritual for 2 hours throughout this process. And yet, each person was denied a lifetime filled with experiences that can not be quantified.

Where do we run when the earth shakes… 

and their poison lights up our skies?

Where do we run when the earth shakes… 

and their colonial borders on our land are sealed? 

Where do we run when the earth shakes…

and their leaflets taunt us with warnings flutter from our skies?

Where do we run when the earth shakes…

and our sea and air are also under siege?

Where do we run when the earth shakes…

and their white phosphorus hails down from our skies?

Where do we run when the earth shakes…

and we still need to bury our dead?

This work honors all of the Palestinians who have been named. And it honors all those with names we never learned about. Throughout all of the decades.

Where do we run when the earth shakes? is a vessel that offers a promise to the preservation of our collective memory in spite of a world relentlessly committed to our erasure.