a grief quilt for Palestine
In June 2024, a group of students at University College London and The Slade School of Fine Art curated an intervention at the MA Degree Show about their university’s complicity in funding genocide through its investment portfolio. The UCL Action For Palestine’s exhibition, titled the Palestine Zone, provided explicit evidence of this complicity in arms manufacturers, advocated for divestment and an end to apartheid, and celebrated Palestinian culture in the face of attempted erasure since the 1948 Nakba النَّكْبَة & before.
Material gathered here on this page is the result of extensive research and writing by the students of UCL Action for Palestine, the artist who donated their MA show space, and those who worked on the Palestine Zone exhibition alongside the students. Public Library Quilts is simply hosting these resources for ease of distribution, archiving, and to defer website costs. Please follow and cite the collective work of @uclactionforpalestine (banner in photo made by Alice Gabb.)
The students’ demands to their university:
Cut all ties with arms companies and companies on the BDS list.
Practices full transparency in regards to all funding, sponsorships, research partnerships and collaborations with arms and fossil fuel companies.
Stops banking with Barclays, which holds £1 billion in shares and provides over £3 billion in loans to companies which directly support Israel’s apartheid and its genocidal attack on Gaza.
Create scholarships for Palestinian students, and support scholars in rebuilding the Palestinian education system by allocating resources towards the reconstruction of academic institutions and providing funding to students and staff members affected by the conflict.
A Quilt at the Slade
During the student intervention at the Slade, we began a quilt. Inspired by the long tradition of burial and memory quilts, Jess (a teacher at UCL at the time) and Jamila (then a student at UCL) created a community grief quilt where visitors to the exhibition could stitch their rage, hope, and solidarity. As intergenerational objects of care, quilts affirm that useful love will exist in the future as they are passed down between kin. Our Grief Quilt for Palestine affirms that Palestinians will exist, beloved in the future. First gathering to stitch at the Slade, we now hold solidarity quilting bees in London & Cairo. We hope our quilt provides an ongoing way to speak of Palestine & hold grief in the face of genocide.
Universities destroyed in Gaza & embroidered at the centre of our Grief Quilt
Islamic University of Gaza. ... الجامعة الاسلامية | Al-Israa University. ... جامعة الاسراء | Al-Quds Open University. ... جامعة القدس المفتوحة | Al-Azhar University. ... جامعة الأزهر | Palestine Technical College. ... كلية فلسطين التقنية | University College of Applied Sciences. ... | University of Palestine. ... جامعة فلسطين | Al-Aqsa University… جامعة الأقصى | Gaza University… جامعة غزة | Dar al-Kalima University: Gaza Training Centre... جامعة دار الكلمة
How can a university in England be complicit in scholasticide, the targeted killing of teachers, students, and the destruction of educational infrastructure in another country?
Read about UCL Action for Palestine’s work & the quilt in Dazed
“For the students who have set up encampments on their campuses, protesting their tuition fees being invested in companies such as Elbit Systems that are manufacturing arms weapons for the Israeli Defence Forces, using art as resistance goes far beyond flowery language. Instead, it functions as a medium through which to express their politics, allowing them to demonstrate their frustration, grief and solidarity. Below, we look at how art students at UAL, Goldsmiths, and the Slade School of Fine Art are mobilising this aspect of art and visual culture, disrupting end-of-year degree shows, and escalating their actions to demand change on their campuses.” - article by Zara Afthab
We are grateful to Peckham keffiyeh for donating the block printed fabric for our Grief Quilt.
Peckham Keffiyeh is a grassroots initiative in London raising funds for Palestinians through block printing.
The Grief Quilt in early August 2024 at Rabbits Road Press before the names of universities in Gaza were added.
Recent Quilting Bees for Palestine
-
Quilting at artist studios in East London
Artists, teachers, activists and students have gathered to continue to add the names of Palestinians killed and Universities in Gaza destroyed by the state of Israel to the surface of our quilt. Big thanks to Esther, Caroline, & Alice.
-
Quilting at Rabbits Road Press with OOMK
A day of community art making, riso printing, and activism at Rabbits Road Press in London with the collective One of My Kind, a Muslim and faith-based publishing collective. Big thanks to Heiba & Sofia.
How is a quilt made?
Jess of Public Library Quilts assembled the quilt top and backing for our grief quilt. Jamila and Jess then basted the quilt’s three layers together with pins at the Slade. Our community then gathered to tie the quilt’s layers together with colourful thread, a traditional way of finishing a quilt where folks with different sewing skills can participate. Embroiders and textile artists, members of the public and students have since contributed beautiful stitching and appliqué to the surface of the Grief Quilt.
Our quilt contains the names of Palestinians who are both alive and making art about their homeland and people who have been killed in the genocide. This quilt honours the dead while recognising the living.
Films exhibited at the UCL Action For Palestine’s intervention at The Slade, June 2024. Watch via the links here.
There are many more moving Palestinian films & documentaries. Here we share videos that are open source which we could exhibit at the Slade. Special thanks to UCL teachers who assisted the Palestine Zone with compiling this list.
The Embroiderers, 2016 - المط ِّرزات A film by Maeve Brennan
Who are the Women behind the embroidery we purchase? What does embroidery mean to them? We wanted to know whether the craft remains political for those who make it. The Embroiderers follows five women through interviews we conducted with embroiderers from all over Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan.
Here and Elsewhere, 1976 A political essay by Jean-Luc Godard
In 1970, Jean-Luc Godard and filmmaking partner Jean-Pierre Gorin embarked on an ambitious project about the Palestinian liberation movement, which was to be titled Until Victory. Utilising lightweight, easily mobile 16mm cameras, the filmmakers followed the activities of the Palestinian revolutionary group Al Fatah as they prepared to recapture land seized by the Israeli forces during the Six-Day War. Shooting over several months in Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon, the pair gathered hours of footage to be edited into a feature. As the title implies, the film was initially conceived to showcase a successful act of armed resistance against occupation; when screened in France, the project was intended to target what Godard and Gorin considered to be a deeply complacent Left, still languishing in a state of resignation following the failure of the May “68 protests, and shake them out of their apathy. The production ended in tragedy, however: while in France, Godard and Gorin received the news that King Hussein’s counterrevolutionary forces massacred thousands of civilians and revolutionaries in Amman – including many of the subjects of Until Victory.
Naila and the Uprising, 2017 A film by Julia Bacha
When a nation-wide uprising breaks out in 1987, a woman in Gaza must make a choice between love, family, and freedom. Undaunted, she embraces all three, joining a clandestine network of women in a movement that forces the world to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination for the first time. Naila and the Uprising chronicles the remarkable journey of Naila Ayesh whose story weaves through the most vibrant, nonviolent mobilization in Palestinian history -- the First Intifada in the late 1980s.
Brian Cox reads IF I MUST DIE, the last poem by Refaat Alareer, killed by an Israeli airstrike
Brian Cox reads If I Must Die, by beloved Palestinian poet, teacher and martyr Refaat Alareer. Refaat was killed on December 7th by an Israeli airstrike. This was the last poem he published.
Pratibha Parmar, Alice Walker: Three Poems on Palestine, 2024
These three poems about Palestine are written and spoken by Pultizer Prize winning author Alice Walker. Filmed by her friend filmmaker Pratibha Parmar in Mexico on February 9th, 2024 on Alice Walker's 80th birthday.
Fundraisers for the families of two Palestinian artists
Postcards of these artist’s work were sold at the Palestine Zone to raise funds after they were both killed in the genocide.
Mohammed Sami Qaraiqa
“Mohammed was seeking refuge at al Ahli after his family were displaced from their home in Shuja'iyya, a neighborhood nearby. He posted a video on Instagram of him playing with children at the hospital the day before he was killed. He joined Tamer's youth team as a volunteer when he was 14 - giving art workshops to children at schools and community libraries in Gaza.”
Heba Zagout
“Born in the Al Bureij refugee camp in Gaza, Zagout grew up listening to the stories of her elders, who would routinely narrate the events leading up to the creation of Israel in 1948. According to her sister Maysaa Ghazi, Zagout developed a love of painting from a young age. This included telling the stories of her own family - Palestinians who were forcibly expelled from the village of Isdud, now known as the Israeli city of Ashdod, and made to seek refuge in the Gaza Strip”
We host teach-ins on the Grief Quilt & are grateful to Dr Gabe Beckhurst who shared the long history of exhibiting art for Palestine.
Gabe recommends: Past Disquiet: Artists, International Solidarity and Museums in Exile, Edited byKristine Khouri and Rasha Salti
The International Art Exhibition for Palestine was inaugurated in Beirut (Lebanon), in March 1978, and was intended as the seed collection for a museum in exile...
Librarians in London printed out zines for the Palestine Zone about culture and resistance.
You can read some great zines from this list compiled by Librarians for Palestine. Many libraries and online grassroots archives also share zines.
Dr Refaat Alareer (1979 - 2023)
a Palestinian poet & writer, graduate of University College London whose death in the genocide the university has not acknowledged.
If I must die
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself–
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
إذا كان لا بدّ أن أموت
Translated to Arabic by @TameeOliveFern
إذا كان لا بدّ أن أموت
فعليكَ أن تحيا
لِتقصّ قصّتي
لِتبيعَ أشيائي
لِتشتري قطعة قماش
و بضعةَ خيوط
(بيضاء بذيلٍ طويل)
حتى طفلٍ، في مكانٍ ما في غزة
يحدّقُ بالسماء
ينتظرُ أباه، الذي غادرَ على عجل-
بلا أن يودّع أحد
حتى جسده
حتى نفسه -
يرى الطائرة الورقية، طائرتي التي صنعتَها،
تحلّقُ عاليًا
و يظنُّ لوهلة أن ملاكًا عاليًا
يُعيد الحبّ
——
إذا كان لا بد أن أموت
لتجعلها تجلبُ الأمل
لتجعلها قصةT
