“A delegation of US artists traveled to the Gaza Strip earlier this summer to paint 10 collaborative murals (8 completed, 2 still in process) in several places around Gaza, with multi-fold intentions of bringing attention to the water and environmental crises faced by the 1.6 million Palestinians trapped inside and to build relationships between communities in the US and in Palestine.
Organizing the Maia Mural Project, Dr. Susan Greene — a San Francisco Bay Area-based Palestine solidarity activist and artist/co-founder of the Break the Silence Mural and Arts project in Palestine and the Olympia-Rafah Solidarity Mural Project (ORSMP) — told The Electronic Intifada that the goal of the project was to build across movements and get people there who haven’t been there before, and weren’t necessarily connected to the Palestinian issue to begin with.
The mural project was born of a collaboration between several US arts and activism organizations, including theEstria Foundation, the ORSMP, and the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) — which has been raising funds to employ local organizations in Gaza to build much-needed water purification and desalination systems for Palestinian schoolchildren via their Maia project (maia means “water” in Arabic). MECA says they have helped provide water systems to 14 large UN schools in Palestinian refugee camps and to 13 kindergartens in refugee camps, towns, and villages.
(“These graffiti artists were fantastic,” said Greene. “They were already great at community mural work where they live, and came to Gaza to paint these huge walls in areas where Maia water purification systems had been set up with funds raised by MECA. I was blown away. They were my mentors. They had a lot of help from people and kids from the community — including strong Gazan artists who work in aerosol. They worked with 30 artists in Rafah for a mural that’s still in progress now.”)”
-The Electronic Intifada