Since October 2025, the collaborative project The Meaning of Home: A Perpetual State of Displacement has brought together young artists and designers from Birzeit University in Palestine, Sint Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp in Belgium, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, the School for New Dance Development, and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The students, teachers and guest speakers have been meeting online for five months across three localities, to reflect on the meaning and memory of home amidst erasure and displacement. Taking place against the backdrop of an ongoing assault on Palestinian identity—its origins, its expressions, and its futures—the programme has explored what it means to belong to a place. What is the meaning of home, when its inhabitants are forced to carry it with them, reconstructing it anew with each displacement?

This collaborative initiative came together 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.

March 2026 the cohort supposed to spend a week sharing and working together in person at the Sint Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp, culminating in a collective exhibition in Antwerp and Brussels. But, due to the war on Iran all flights were cancelled, and the workshop was called off.

“Despite our different cultures, religions and geographies, our shared humanity remains ” wrote the students of the Birzeit University in the zine that we made to capture the traces of our exchanges. They underline that every person deserves to feel safe, to belong, and to have a place they can call home: “and despite us not being able to see the project through until the end in Belgium, due to the current war, we still wanted to be present through the images, sketches, reflections and gestures that this publication carries.We are present, and always will be.”

• Publication editing and design: Raghad Suleiman, Jawa Refai, Aya Alahmad, Leen Foqaha, Shahd Faraj (Birzeit University), and Omar Abhar (Sint Lucas School of Arts). Cover image: Raghad Suleiman. With gratitude to Gerard Leysen (Sint Lucas School of Arts) for production and printing

During six online sessions with guest speakers and working sessions, students developed various projects in close conversation with each other, exploring how the meaning of “home” has been reshaped by displacement and uncertainty, and how everyday practices and objects—from chairs to temporary structures like tents—have evolved to accommodate the state of perpetual displacement?

• Participating artists and designers: Ibtisam Abukaff, Majd Abumadi, Rahaf Mansour, Demetra Cuschera, Sasha Anguelovskaia, Freja Nøhr Kristiansen, Eleni Ploumi, Lisa Bakker, Omar Abhar, Aya Alahmad, Batool Muadi, Malak Zahran, Shahd Faraj, Samra Roseboom, Melania Trejo Mendez, Elham Ahmadi, Eline Antonine Zeevat, Vladimir Babinchuk, Jawa Refai, Leen Foqaha, Raghad Suleiman, Aez Pinay, Berke Eren Gün, Anna Banout, Fareed Fareed, Lizzie Breen
• Fascilitators: Mercedes Azpilicueta (Rietveld Academie), Rasha Dakkak (Rietveld Academie), Yasid El Rifai (Birzeit University), Anik Fournier (If I Can’t Dance), Sara Giannini (If I Can’t Dance), Ibrahim Muhtadi (Disarming Design from Palestine), Luke Shirock (Disarming Design from Palestine), Dennis Sobeh (Birzeit University), Dima Yaser (Birzeit University), Annelys de Vet (Sint Lucas School of Arts), Antoinette Vonder Muehll, and acknowledgements to Kurt Vanbelleghem

Lecture series

Associate Professor of Architecture Dr. Shaden Awad, Gaza-born artist Mohamed Abusal, trans-local researcher and writer Nuraini Juliastuti, and artist and graphic designer Hafez Omar each contributed lectures that offered frameworks for thinking and collective reflection. Drawing from their distinct practices and situated knowledges, they opened perspectives on space, memory, displacement, resistance, and forms of solidarity that shaped the conditions for the series of gatherings. We hold these recordings dear as acts of bearing witness.

Home as an existential condition – home killing- Palestine
Dr. Shaden Awad, 21 November 2025

• Dr. Shaden Awad is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Department of Architectural Engineering at Birzeit University. She holds a PhD in Architecture from Graz University of Technology in Austria. She also holds two master’s degrees: one in Urban Planning and Design and another in Conservation. Her research interests focus on architectural representation, meaning-making in architecture, colonial studies, and spatial design.

Meeting the needs of the visual arts
Mohamed Abusal , 19 December 2025

• Mohamed Abusal is an acclaimed artist born and raised in Gaza, where he has worked at a prolific rate, producing daring and innovative work that has attracted widespread publicity and garnered much critical acclaim. A co-founder of the Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Art, Abusal has been an essential voice in Gaza’s contemporary art landscape. Since 2024, due to the genocide, he has been displaced to France with his family, where he now works as an artist and researcher.

Project “ Moenipah OS.”
Nuraini Juliastuti, 9 January 2026

• Nuraini Juliastuti is a trans-local practicing researcher and writer, focusing on art organizations, activism, illegality, alternative cultural production, and archiving. She obtained her PhD from the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University. In 2020, she took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Amsterdam working within the Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation project at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA).

On the meaning of home
Hafez Omar, 30 January 2026

• Hafez Omar is an artist and graphic designer, who practices moves between political poster-making and research-based installation work, his work explores the intersections of art and politics. He is a member at the Palestinian popular dance troop and lecturer at the design program at the faculty of art, music, and design at Birzeit University. He also has a background in special design. He came from interior design and he has been also involved in many exhibitions and incorporated in different art interventions space interventions.