Research & Publications

Making the Intangible Tangible: Tatreez Under the Rubble

Founded in 2010 by six sisters in the Al-Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City—Noor, Nadreen, Badoor, Basma, Ayah, and Hiba Shasha-ah—6 Flowers embodies this quiet, generational act of resistance. What began as a shared love for embroidery blossomed into a livelihood, a source of joy, and a testament to the power of sisterhood. “There is nothing sweeter than sisterhood,” one sister shared, a phrase that now echoes with grief and resilience. On January 24, 2023, a photo was taken of the sisters gathered in their home, stitching together over stories. When they returned on February 11, 2024, all that remained was rubble.

Making the Intangible Tangible: Tatreez Under the Rubble
Written by Wafa Ghnaim, Curator

Curated by the Palestinian Museum, “Gaza Remains the Story” centers on transforming absence into presence—making the inaccessible accessible, the intangible tangible. This exhibition is a constellation of historical photographs, infographics, artworks, posters, audio recordings, and ephemeral fragments that coalesce into a transportable digital archive. Designed to be printed, shared, and witnessed in any space, it speaks to the urgency of archiving in a time when evisceration, obliteration, and suppression haunt the backdrop of the everyday.

Since October 7, 2023, more than 61,709 people in Gaza have been killed, including over 17,492 children (Al Jazeera, 2023). These figures reflect only those who have been formally identified by name and civil documentation through Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Countless others remain unnamed, lost, or still buried beneath the rubble of their homes. Beyond this staggering human toll, Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has also entailed the systematic destruction of daily life: the erasure of entire cities and homes (urbicide), the devastation of farmland and ecosystems (ecocide), the targeting of schools and universities (scholasticide), and the obliteration of cultural institutions and heritage. Museums such as Rafah Museum and Qarara Museum were deliberately bombed, reducing irreplaceable collections to dust. Despite the enormity of loss, teams from these institutions—and from the Palestinian Museum—continue to work tirelessly to safeguard what remains and to imagine a cultural future beyond devastation (Dedman, 2025).

In this moment, how do Palestinians in the diaspora maintain a sense of self while bearing witness to the most televised genocide in human history? What are all the ways we can testify—across identities, languages, mediums, and borders—to safeguard the integrity of the historical record? How do we hold onto the fragments of cultural memory that are deliberately and systematically targeted for erasure? As Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes in Decolonizing Methodologies, Indigenous storytelling, oral traditions, and land-based systems of memory form archives rooted not in institutions, but in bodies, land, and kinship (Smith, 2012). These modes of witness challenge Eurocentric paradigms that privilege written documentation over lived and inherited knowledge, which forms the framework for this exhibition.

Yet when Palestinian bodies are treated like chess pieces on the global stage, how can we begin to decolonize the written word and urgently recover the oral histories that were once so carefully preserved across generations? Colonial and Eurocentric epistemologies have long dismissed oral traditions as anecdotal, untrustworthy, or mythological, relegating them to folklore rather than recognizing it as a legitimate source of history. Smith critiques this dismissal as a form of epistemic violence, where knowledge is validated only through colonial frameworks, rather than within its own cultural and relational contexts (Smith, 2012). The story of the 6 Flowers, founded in 2010 by six sisters (Noor, Nadreen, Badoor, Basma, Ayah, and Hiba Shasha’ah) in the Al-Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City, makes this clear. After they found their supplies reduced to rubble and they were exiled once again to the south in March, 2025, one sister reflected: “There is nothing sweeter than sisterhood.” Her words testify to a knowledge system held not in books, but in hands, relationships, and place (Shasha’ah, 2025). To decolonize the archive, then, requires the radical inclusion of not only the stories, but also the names, faces, and places of the people who carried them, even as they are forced to scatter. Palestinian futurity may depend on our ability to write the unwritten and to carry memory forward, so that the next generation may once again embody it.

While adapting this exhibition for the Museum of the Palestinian People amid the relentless and unending genocide intensifying in Gaza and the West Bank, it became immediately clear that safeguarding Palestinian cultural heritage and the names of its keepers can never rely on a static archive. Once protected by our elders through oral transmission, this knowledge is now being deliberately targeted, and with each loss, generations of memory vanish in an instant. Ethical recordkeeping must step in to ensure oral history survives. The archive must become a living document: a vital, and at times quiet, counterforce to hegemony and colonial erasure. It cannot be preserved in amber. It must remain porous and adaptive; led by community, held in collective hands, and carried forward in defiance of enforced silence.

Testimony articulates the inarticulable. When the survivor speaks, their testimony interrupts silence, denial, and historical revision. Yet testimony is not complete without a listener. That listener, too, is transformed—wounded, changed, and drawn into the weight of what has been spoken. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing (1992), Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue that testimony is not simply a recounting of facts; it is a performative act of reliving and reprocessing that creates meaning within the shared space between the survivor (speaker) and the listener (witness to the witness) (Felman & Laub, 1992). In this dynamic, both speaker and listener become witnesses. The act of testifying bridges absence and presence, silence and speech, past and present. It demands to be heard, and implicates the listener in the ongoing act of remembrance.

But testimony does not always unfold in a coherent narrative. Sometimes it emerges as a stammer, a gesture, or silence. This fragmented form of testimony mirrors the fractured reality of the Palestinian experience, where the destruction of land, of bodies, of time is the very condition of our reality. Some Palestinians give voice to our fractures; others carry them quietly. Many cannot speak at all. And yet through these fragments, testimony endures. 

In the Islamic tradition, the Arabic word shahada—often translated as "witnessing"—carries profound spiritual and moral connotations. To bear witness is not passive observation; it is an affirmation of truth. It is a responsibility, a moral accounting, and often, a form of martyrdom (Nasr, 2001). In Palestine, witnessing becomes remembrance, sacrifice, and resistance. Testimony is recorded in the body, sometimes without words or stories or external action. To give testimony is sometimes simply to survive.

In this light, tatreez (embroidery) is not merely decorative, it is declarative. It is a form of both testimony and witness passed across generations, transcending speech and surviving displacement (Ghnaim, 2016). While this spotlight focuses on tatreez under the rubble, many belongings of Palestinian families now live lifelessly in the dust. Once held by ordinary people, once resting quietly in a room, their stillness on the ground now carries a different weight. What remains when a home is gone except the trace of what it held? Are these afterimages just a “story”? What kind of stories are left in the dust? What does “Gaza Remains the Story” mean to you?

References:

  • 6 Flowers. Instagram: @flowersgaza, Accessed on March 25, 2025.

  • Al Jazeera. (2023, October 9). Israel-Gaza war in maps and charts: Live tracker. Al Jazeera. Retrieved on April 1, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

  • Dedman, Rachel. Wall label from 'Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine' at Hayy Jameel, Jeddah, January 23 – April 17, 2025.

  • Felman, S., & Laub, D. (1992). Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Routledge.

  • Ghnaim, W. (2016). Tatreez & Tea: Embroidery and Storytelling in the Palestinian Diaspora. Self-published.

  • Nasr, S. H. (2001). Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study. World Wisdom.

  • Shasha’ah, Badoor of the 6 Flowers sisters. Interview by Wafa Ghnaim. Conducted via WhatsApp on 25 March 2025.

  • Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books.

  • The Palestinian Museum. (n.d.). Gaza remains the story. Retrieved March 24, 2025, from https://gaza-palestinianmuseum.org/

Learn more about upcoming events and curatorial updates regarding this exhibition at: https://www.tatreezandtea.com/gaza

Explore the Museum of the Palestinian People’s collections and ongoing research at: https://mpp-dc.org/learn/

Share this exhibit in your space at: https://palmuseum.org/en/GazaRemainsTheStory

If referencing or quoting this essay in your own work, please cite as follows:

Wafa Ghnaim, "Making the Intangible Tangible: Tatreez Under the Rubble,” The Tatreez Institute (blog), April 11, 2025, https://www.tatreezandtea.com/tatreezing/2025/3/grtsrubble