News- Middle East: In the midst of shattered concrete and twisted iron that once was a happy home in Gaza, a painting lies covered in piles of dust and ash, its colors faded and quiet.

Once it may have held a face, a field, or a memory, but now it is only fragments of canvas clinging to a broken frame—an image erased, like the lives that lived beside it.

For decades, the Israeli settler-colonial regime sought to erase Palestinians through violence, imprisonment, displacement, siege, and exile. This erasure has extended to popular culture itself.

Since the Nakba in 1948, when the Israeli regime illegally came into existence through the forcible occupation of Palestinian lands, Palestinian cultural production—art, literature, music, architecture—has faced destruction, sabotage, and theft.

In Gaza today, after 22 months of Israel’s genocidal war, countless artworks, studios, galleries, museums, archives, personal collections, and cultural heritage sites lie in ruins.

Many of these works have been looted by the marauding regime soldiers, and others are buried under collapsed buildings along with their owners. The scale of this cultural loss is impossible to measure.

Yet Palestinians are known for their steadfastness in the face of apartheid, occupation, and war.

While Israel’s devastating assault has destroyed artworks as part of a broader attack on Palestinian heritage, an online initiative called “DNA: A Code of Life and Identity,” launched by “Art-Zone Palestine,” aims to create a digital archive of Palestinian artists and their work.

Art-Zone Palestine is an independent digital cultural platform exploring the evolution of Palestinian visual art and its resilience through a war that seeks to annihilate any sign of the Palestinian presence.

It focuses on marginalized works and experiences—whether excluded by dominant cultural frameworks or erased, destroyed, or stolen under colonial occupation—in order to retrieve and restore their deliberately lost existence.

According to the cultural platform, “DNA” seeks to protect art pieces and, by extension, Palestinian identity itself, especially amid the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing.

After the relentless bombardment of Gaza, many artworks now survive only as digital traces—photographs stored on phones and laptops—serving as the last surviving “DNA” of pieces that no longer physically exist.

The initiative goes beyond archiving: it seeks to spark intellectual, ethical, and political discussions about responding to cultural annihilation within the framework of genocide.

Art-Zone Palestine says each act of revival challenges the erasure imposed by the Israeli genocidal war and affirms the enduring presence of Palestinian culture.

It is a defiant act of survival and resistance: by collecting, reproducing, displaying, and discussing these images, Palestinians can resist cultural erasure, keep memory alive, and even create new forms of meaning, it adds.

“The ‘DNA’ initiative is not merely about preserving images of lost artworks; it’s about confronting cultural annihilation and asserting our identity,” says Mahmoud Abohashash, an advisory member of ArtZone Palestine. “By engaging with these digital remnants, we challenge the forces that seek to erase our existence and narratives.”

In Gaza, Art-Zone Palestine says, an artwork carries the weight of siege, destruction, and identity.

Even when destroyed, the platform notes, an artwork retains revolutionary potential through its memory, copies, or fragments.

By gathering and exhibiting images of destroyed artworks, Art-Zone Palestine hopes to stir public consciousness and mobilize action.

This is not a passive archive; it is an act of defiance against attempts to silence Palestinian creativity and identity, the cultural platform notes.

“These works live on, not as secondary copies but as primary artifacts of resilience. They carry within them the history of their own erasure. Their presence in the digital space is not a shadow of what once was, but a new form of existence that challenges our notions of originality,” Abohashash says.

“Anyone can now have a piece at home that reminds them of what humanity had to suffer and is a witness to one of the most brutal episodes in human history.”

For Art-Zone Palestine, replication is not a dilution; it is survival. The digital copies are not weaker than the originals; they are their afterlives, their testimonies.

The DNA project is cumulative, designed to grow as more artists contribute images of works lost to war. Each addition expands the collective memory, offering new opportunities for dialogue, solidarity, and resistance.

Through these digital fragments, Palestinians reclaim agency over their cultural heritage, refusing to let annihilation dictate the final word, the cultural platform explains.

Taghreed  Abdel Aal, Art-Zone Palestine Director, states that the independent digital platform is concerned with contemporary Palestinian artworks that have been marginalized and neglected, as well as those exterminated by Zionist colonialism and occupation.

“At our launch, we exhibited about 1,200 artworks by Gaza’s artists whose works were destroyed by the Zionist enemy. We named this exhibition DNA to allow the reproduction of these works in more than one place in the world,” she was quoted as saying in the media.

Basel El Maquusi, a Palestinian artist in Gaza, has lost nearly everything he created, but he continues to paint, guiding children and helping them transform the burden of war into color and expression.

He was contacted by the Art-Zone platform seeking to archive his work lost in the war.

“Some paintings depicted the realities of the first Intifada, the advent of the Palestinian Authority, and the wars waged upon Gaza. This platform is attempting to preserve these works. Today, all these works have been lost under the rubble,” he was quoted as saying.

May Murad is another Palestinian artist who left Gaza in 2018 and now lives in France. She lost all her paintings during the ongoing genocide in the besieged territory, which has claimed more than 62,000 lives and destroyed much of the civilian infrastructure.

She says it’s like losing part of her soul. But Art-Zone Palestine is helping to ensure her work endures.

“Most of our artworks were destroyed in the war, although it is never more important than the loss of lives. My mother is using the destroyed artwork to make a fire to cook a meal that could save a human life,” Murad notes.

“This is the paradox of art and life, of memory and survival, which makes me more committed to my role as an artist to preserve our history and defy oblivion.”

Source: Press TV