"Peace for Gaza, peace peace peace!" This plea, which was posted on Instagram on October 17, was accompanied by a video taken during a recreational workshop organized for children at Al-Ahli Hospital. The words were the last ones spoken by 24-year-old Palestinian artist Mohamed Sami Qraiqa, who died under bombardment. Along with 13 other visual artists, the young man had taken part in the Atelier du nuage ("Cloud Workshop"), a large panorama created under the auspices of the HAWAF collective ("margins," in Arabic). It is on view until December 31 at the exhibition "What Palestine Brings to the World," at the Institut du monde arabe (IMA, "Arab World Institute"), in Paris.

The canvas, which was sewn in Gaza, depicts a large blue cloud with a flight of steps running through it, unencumbered by men and women. "The cloud is a comforting image when you're a child: You dream of snuggling up and falling asleep in it. It's also the cloud, where digital data is stored," said Salman Nawati, co-founder of the collective, which was set up in Gaza by three artists and an architect.

It all began in 2021 when French-Algerian visual artist Mohamed Bourouissa traveled to the Palestinian enclave to shoot a film. Out of his meeting with Salman Nawati, artist Mohamed Abusal and architect Sondos Al-Nakhala, a vision emerged of creating a museum − virtual at first, to protect the archaeological, historical and artistic heritage of this strip of land under embargo. "We can't have a physical museum in Gaza. It would be impossible to protect in an environment under siege, where conflicts arise at least every two years," said Nawati. He then came up with the idea of the Sahab ("cloud") format.

The project began to evolve over several Zoom meetings, before taking final shape during a residency for two HAWAF members at the Cité des Arts in Paris. One evening, over maqloubeh − a typical Palestinian dish of rice, meat and vegetables − artists from the collective and those from the Palestinian diaspora exchanged their visions for the final form of this "cloud museum." "We want to show the humanity of the people of Gaza, reduce the enclave's isolation and bridge the gap between it and the rest of the world," said Marion Slitine, a French researcher and member of the collective, which now includes some 20 artists.

Last spring, HAWAF brought together some 15 young visual artists from Gaza at the Eltiqa gallery, one of only two art venues in the city. Each participant in the Cloud Workshop was asked to select a work or object from their daily lives and donate it to the Sahab Museum, which then digitized the items. The scanned objects were then hidden within the framework of the painting on display at the IMA, using an augmented reality device.

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