Memorial Gaza Chest Panel

I’ve been embroidering a Memorial Gaza Chest Panel as remembrance for generations of Palestinian women and girls killed through decades of colonial violence.In traditional Tatreez, dark indigo threads spoke of grief and loss.

Widowed women often stitched over red with blue, marking the passage from love to mourning. I’m embroidering with an even darker blue, not just as lament for the women we lost in Gaza, but also as a warning to other Palestinians. We risk severing our practices from their pulse, if we begin to orbit our practice around algorithmic cues and trend cycles. 

This piece asks me to return to Tatreez in its devotional form and is my way of carrying forward Palestinian women's matriarchal insistence on memory, especially when the world chooses to look away, I invite you to look even closer.