A Question Mark Hangs Over Gaza

The physical exhibition has been displayed in 4 different European cities so far, and the digital exhibition - a website-version of the physical one - is intended as a resource for a general public, which, overall, compelled us to shape the content so as to accommodate its urgent and shifting nature as the exhibit evolved and went from one location to another. This led to a creative and material challenge of its own: how can we build an exhibit on an extremely urgent topic, and have it reflect the incessant changes that the situation in Gaza continues to bear, whether shifts in elements, narrative, or data.

Structuring the project around “questions” was also a way to recenter the perspective of children in Gaza - a perspective all too often forgotten, and yet they remain of one the main victims of a terrible conflict. The “question” asked is thus “hanging over their heads”, as an exemplification of a looming, uncertain future. The only certainty is the atrocity of the current situation - and we wanted to communicate its humanitarian urgency in the most first-hand, unfettered way possible, which led us to show the situation as it is through the lens of the Palestinian photographers who meet them daily.

We built the exhibition around 5 modules, where each sought to answer one key question, through datapoints, visualizations, explanations, maps and statistics, as well as photos and recordings by Palestinian photo-journalists. We built intuitive data visualizations to better understand and communicate the magnitude of the struggles, having previously gone through a research process of collecting and analyzing the data and its sources. On top of the visual and written content, we also created a sound layer that was accessible both in the physical exhibition and the online one, where we used real field recordings to constitute an ambient soundscape to the experience, that varied according to the different questions and thematics explored. When necessary, we carefully recreated any missing or damaged sounds to reflect the original environment as accurately as possible. 

The 5 questions were: 

• How do children get water in the Gaza Strip? 
• Are children still attending school? 
• What do children in Gaza eat? 
• Where children sleep? 
• Is Gaza safe for children?

The physical exhibition displayed everything on wooden freestanding structure panels, arranged around the exhibition space. It was first in Madrid, in Espacio Montesa, then in Dublin, in the Complex building, and then Brussels, in the Horta-Lambeau “Pavillon des Passions Humaines”. 

On the other hand, the website, accessible here, was created with the idea of being an online exhibition that could be experienced by anyone in the world, in order to thus reach a wider audience and go beyond merely the people who could attend the physical exhibitions in select cities. The website experience thus follows the same concept and structure as the physical one, but expands on the different questions, taking a more guided, journalistic approach, and providing more photos, videos and stories from the ground. We also had the chance to go through the hundreds of photos and videos from UNICEF’s archive of audiovisual materials related to the State of Palestine emergency, which allowed us to provide a much wider range and wealth of images and visual contexts.

In fact, the website can be visited in two different ways: with a gallery view, where visitors can freely explore the 25 photos of the exhibition and read the captions, and with a "questions" view, where, with each question, through a "scrolly-telling" interaction, users can scroll into this deeper context. 

As part of the website, we also included a context page, where we provided more resources and context on the situation. One of the main features of this page is an interactive map, done by the United Nations Satellite Centre, showing the Comprehensive Damage Assessment. Through this map, users can see the level of damaged and destroyed structures in the whole Gaza Strip. We further added the possibility to "zoom in" to those different areas, in order to see real photos and videos of how that destruction looks like - a way to help communicate what these numbers, lines and dots really mean. 

Through the social media campaign, which was posted on the unicefpalestine Instagram account, as well as with several pieces of the installation, we worked with an idea of “missing images” - missing images of a Palestinian child thriving, and instead an image of their everyday struggle and suffering.