The notion of home typically refers to a place, the original “thereness” of one’s belonging: to a landscape, to a people, a language. It also refers to a temporality: to the prospect of return. Home is inherently unhomely, a constantly moving and shifting assemblage of needs, habits, passions and affects we invest into a place to create that life-world, that comfort we call home. As long as war and genocide persist, home can be nothing other than this desire, this state of longing: for connection, for justice, for peace.

These different sets of postcards offer intimate insights into what home means to designers Aya Alahmad, Ibtisam Abukaff, Jawa Refai, Shahd Faraj, Raghad Suleiman, Malak Zahran, and Ibrahim Muhtadi. The series of cards was developed in the context of a collaboration with the Birzeit University, Sint Lucas School of Arts and Dutch scholars as an act of bearing witness to the ongoing violence in Palestine, from the settler-colonial practices in the West Bank and Jerusalem to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where people have long lived in a constant state of displacement and now face the destruction of entire cities, neighbourhoods, communities, and ways of living and creating.