أربعةُ مفاتيح في أقفالِ المدينةِ الصَدِئة Four Keys in the City’s Rusty Locks

This special issue of 28 Magazine was produced in partnership with contemporary art and advocacy foundation TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Featured are four essays written from and about Gaza, all of them concerned with the imperative of survival in the face of unspeakable violence and devastation. There is a question that imposes itself throughout the issue: How to rebuild meaning amid the most extraordinary of conditions? Through indelible anecdotes and profound reflections on displacement, mourning, and navigating the everyday, we encounter writers who articulate, with extraordinary clarity, how to insist on agency when everything is designed to foreclose it.

Project Context Note: Archival Reconstruction & Historical Continuity

The destruction of 28 Magazine’s rich archive and physical space in Gaza during Israel’s ongoing genocide is part of a wider, systematic assault on the infrastructures that purport  to preserve and transmit through which Palestinian cultural production and histories. Established in Gaza as an independent space for emerging Palestinian writers, visual artists, filmmakers, and cultural organisers, 28 Magazine developed a living record of the city’s dynamic artistic and cultural life through its publishing activities, Gallery 28 exhibitions, and theatre programmes. Produced in partnership with TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, this special issue responds to, and pushes against, that rupture. Bringing together four essays written from and about Gaza, it connects the loss of a physical cultural infrastructure to the ongoing work of writing, remembering, and articulating meaning under conditions of forced displacement and unprecedented devastation. By documenting personal testimonies from Gaza and providing displaced writers with a platform for publication, the project carries forward 28 Magazine’s commitment to ensuring that perspectives emerging from Gaza remain integral to the historical record.