Deir al-Balah / Gaza / PNN/
Amid the rubble of her destroyed home in Deir al-Balah, Palestinian visual artist Maysa Yousef continues her creative journey, determined to defy the devastation that war has brought to her life and her three children.
Born in Gaza in 1984, Yousef holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Al-Aqsa University. For more than a decade, she has experimented with collage art—an expressive form rooted in cutting, gluing, and repurposing everyday environmental materials like discarded paper, worn fabric, yarn, cardboard, and old newspapers. “Everything around me has the potential to become art,” she says.
Yousef has exhibited her work both locally and internationally. But the latest war in Gaza, which escalated in August 2023, changed everything. After evacuating her neighborhood on Al-Mazra’a Street, her home was bombed on August 24 with incendiary explosives, destroying nearly 80% of the property—especially her studio, which housed years of work, sketches, and her most recent exhibition, S, which was shown only once and largely lost in the destruction.
Yet the loss didn’t silence her. In the early days of displacement, her home became a shelter for around 70 relatives and neighbors. With schools shut down and children left idle, she began offering art workshops to help them express their trauma.
“These kids had seen corpses and destroyed homes. They lost friends and routines. Suddenly, they were helping with chores like baking and fetching water. Their childhood vanished,” she explains. “That pushed me to act—to give them a space to reclaim what they had lost.”
Through her work with Hope and Play, a UK-based nonprofit, Yousef began organizing ongoing art activities for displaced children. She connected them with established international artists, including painter Hannah Gardiner, who sends weekly drawings that the children respond to with their own illustrations—mirroring their lives and emotions through art.
After several displacements, Yousef returned to her home to find it nearly uninhabitable. “There were no walls, no windows—just ruins,” she says. Still, she found resolve. “Losing a house doesn’t mean losing a person or their ideas. As long as we live, we create.”
Much of Yousef’s art explores themes of displacement and memory, drawing parallels between her family's present and the 1948 Nakba stories passed down by her grandmother. “Now, our children are living the same trauma our grandparents did,” she reflects.
She recently mounted a new exhibition, titled Aman (Safety), in what remains of her home. The name underscores a desperate longing for stability—physical, economic, and emotional. “There is no safety. We cannot protect ourselves, our children, or even put food on the table,” she says. “This is our way of resisting. Our art completes the story the journalists begin.”
Due to the blockade, many of her large-format artworks—crafted with varied and fragile materials—could not be shipped abroad, despite offers to exhibit them internationally. “It’s safer for them to stay outside Gaza,” she says. “War comes in waves, and nothing here is ever secure.”
Today, she’s rehabilitating a small part of her ruined studio to host workshops for local children, calling it their only outlet to process trauma and express themselves freely.
“As an artist and a member of this community, I live the same suffering and deprivation,” Yousef says. “There’s no electricity, no water, no basic essentials. But I want the world to see this reality through our colors and canvases.”
“I am a survivor of genocide. I don’t want to be just another number. I have a story to tell, and I want the world to hear it. I hope people will stand with Gaza, with its people, and put an end to this endless war. Today we are alive. Tomorrow, who knows?” "She said.
This story was produced as part of the Qarib programme, implemented by the French Media Development Agency (CFI) in partnership with and funded by the French Development Agency (AFD).
