Archiving Gaza in the Present

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Dina Matar FRSA is a professor of political communication and Arab media, with a focus on Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, and chair of SOAS University of London's Centre for Global Media and Communication. Prior to academia, Matar was a news correspondent, editor, and analyst.

Conflict does more than destroy physical spaces. It extinguishes lives, erases histories and disrupts the collective memory of entire communities. In Gaza, where genocide has wrought catastrophic loss, the destruction of heritage adds another dimension of devastation. Yet amid the rubble, acts of archiving, art-making and storytelling persist. Archiving Gaza in the Present brings together voices from Palestine and beyond to document the cultural erasure and to explore how creative and archival practices resist it. Contributions from curators, architects, artists, journalists, lawyers and scholars capture Gaza’s once-vibrant cultural life – historic buildings, art centres, universities and museums that existed before October 2023 – now turned to rubble. Featuring rich visual material – from fragmented WhatsApp testimonies to forensic documentation – and including artworks, maps and photographs, Archiving Gaza in the Present is both a living archive and a call to action. It is a vital resource for understanding Gaza’s cultural survival amid destruction. In partnership with the Arab British Centre. Contributors include Selma Dabbagh, Salman Abu Sitta, Shareef Sarhan, Hazem Harb, Malak Mattar, Marc-André Haldimann, Nadia Yaqub, Omar Al-Qattan, Kegham Djeghalian, Caitlin Procter, Atef Alshaer, Shatha Safi, Yara Sharif and Nasser Golzar.

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