A Visual Memorial to Journalists Killed While Reporting, So Their Faces and Stories Are Not Erased by War and Power
I draw faces because I do not want them to be forgotten.
“In the Crosshairs of Memory” gathers the portraits of journalists killed in Palestine—women and men who lost their lives to tell the truth, to witness what is really happening while the world often looks away.
Since October 7, 2023, from the Hamas attack and Israel’s relentless retaliation on the Gaza Strip, I have been drawing, day by day, the faces of the journalists who were killed. I have worked with the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York to build a visual memorial, so that these faces would not disappear along with their bodies.
This is not about “giving back” what was taken, because that is impossible. It is an act of care, an offering to their memory. Drawing them has been, for me, a way to look them in the eyes, to restore a presence that power and war try to erase. It is also a way to remind ourselves that these men and women chose to tell the world’s stories, to create memory for all of us, until their very last breath.
Art, for me, is a tool of resistance and memory. Drawing is my way of opposing indifference, it is my form of activism. It is my way of saying that every life matters, that every voice silenced must continue to speak to us, even through a line, even through a gaze that challenges us.
Over this past year, my work on journalists who have been killed has not stopped in Gaza. I am drawing the faces of reporters murdered in every corner of the world—in Mexico, Syria, Russia, Ukraine, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Iran—wherever a journalist is silenced. It is a growing, layered visual archive, a drawn testimony against oblivion, against indifference, against the violence that strikes those who choose, every day, to tell the truth.
This exhibition, presented within the Art of Peace Day in Santeramo in Colle, is an invitation to pause and look at these faces, to listen to them, to make space within ourselves for what they ask of us: do not forget, do not remain silent, continue to tell the story.
On Thursday, July 24, inside the Palazzo Marchesale in Santeramo in Colle, we will share this moment of memory and commitment together. The exhibition will be hosted in the Sala “Giandomenico” during the afternoon, as part of a broader program of workshops, dialogues on art and peace, readings, and concerts that will animate the entire day.
This presentation will also serve as a preview of the extended exhibition at Km124 (Santeramo railway station) from July 25 to 31, 2025, where the portraits will continue to inhabit the space, turning it into a place of collective remembrance.
I invite you, if you can, to support Emergency’s clinics in Gaza: a small, concrete gesture of peace, while we continue to remember, to draw, and to tell these stories.
