Gaza heritage and destruction on display in Paris
Around a hundred artifacts, including a 4,000-year-old bowl, a sixth-century mosaic from a Byzantine church and a Greek-inspired statue of Aphrodite, are on display at the Institut du Monde Arabe.
The rich and mixed collection speaks to Gaza's past as a cultural melting pot, but the show's creators also wanted to highlight the contemporary destruction caused by the war, sparked by Hamas's attack on Israel in October 2023.
"The priority is obviously human lives, not heritage," said Elodie Bouffard, curator of the exhibition, which is titled "Saved Treasures of Gaza: 5,000 Years of History".
"But we also wanted to show that, for millennia, Gaza was the endpoint of caravan routes, a port that minted its own currency, and a city that thrived at the meeting point of water and sand," she told AFP.
One section of the exhibition documents the extent of recent destruction.
Using satellite image, the UN's cultural agency UNESCO has already identified damage to 94 heritage sites in Gaza, including the 13th-century Pasha's Palace.
Bouffard said the damage to the known sites as well as treasures potentially hidden in unexplored Palestinian land "depends on the bomb tonnage and their impact on the surface and underground".
"For now, it's impossible to assess."
The attacks by Hamas militants on Israel in 2023 left 1,218 dead. In retaliation, Israeli operations have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and devastated the densely populated territory.
- Lebanon link -
The story behind "Gaza's Treasures" is inseparable from the ongoing wars in the Middle East.
At the end of 2024, the Institut du Monde Arabe was finalising an exhibition on artifacts from the archaeological site of Byblos in Lebanon, but Israeli bombings on Beirut made the project impossible.
"It came to a sudden halt, but we couldn't allow ourselves to be discouraged," said Bouffard.
The idea of an exhibition on Gaza's heritage emerged.
"We had just four and a half months to put it together. That had never been done before," she explained.
Given the impossibility of transporting artifacts out of Gaza, the Institut turned to 529 pieces stored in crates in a specialised Geneva art warehouse since 2006. The works belong to the Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank.
- Conquest -
The Oslo Accords of 1993, signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel, helped secure some of Gaza's treasures.
In 1995, Gaza's Department of Antiquities was established, which oversaw the first archaeological digs in collaboration with the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem (EBAF).
Over the years, excavations uncovered the remains of the Monastery of Saint Hilarion, the ancient Greek port of Anthedon, and a Roman necropolis — traces of civilisations spanning from the Bronze Age to Ottoman influences in the late 19th century.
"Between Egypt, Mesopotamian powers, and the Hasmoneans, Gaza has been a constant target of conquest and destruction throughout history," Bouffard noted.
In the 4th century BC, Greek leader Alexander the Great besieged the city for two months, leaving behind massacres and devastation.
Excavations in Gaza came to a standstill when Hamas took power in 2007 and Israel imposed a blockade.
Land pressure and rampant building in one of the world's most densely populated areas has also complicated archaeological work.
And after a year and a half of war, resuming excavations seems like an ever-more distant prospect.
The exhibition runs until November 2, 2025.
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Agbofah's aim is to recruit his new staff from those same migrant women carrying 120-pound bales on their heads. 'We're bringing them on board and training them so they don't have to do this abusive work, which leads to a lot of spinal issues,' says Agbofah. Aside from simply providing employment, upcycling is also stimulating work, where individual tailors have the creative freedom to figure out what items might blend best together. 'We're trying to provide more dignified work that is better for their health.' It's not just Kantamanto workers who are suffering. Today, much of Ghana feels like it is drowning in other people's waste. According to Lancet Commission data, in 2015 pollution in the air, water and soil was responsible for 15.2% of all deaths in Ghana—double that of alcohol, drugs, and tobacco combined. Studies suggest the situation has only worsened since. Twenty years ago, Shatta Beach in Accra's Georgetown neighborhood was famed for its golden sand and mellow beach break—a family hangout scattered with sun parasols, beanbag chairs, and mellow Afrobeats drifting from palm-fringed bars. Today, the sand is almost completely obscured by a thick layer of plastic and textile waste. Brightly painted fishing boats are penned in by mountains of broken sandals, fabric scraps, and nylon sacking. It's so dense that waste collectors in hi-vis vests must attack the tangle with pickaxes before colleagues can cart chunks away. For when the tide takes garbage from the Korle Lagoon out to sea, it's just a matter of hours before the reversing currents carry it straight back to nearby shores. 'As well as cleaning up the beach, what's most important is finding the [fashion] label tags,' says Bright Gyimah, 19, who has worked clearing up Accra's beaches since last year. 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Oxfam GB, which says it earned $2.5 million for 2024/25 from all its recycling, says third-party partners are expected to remove any waste before export and to sort clothing to ensure that it is a suitable standard for local markets. 'We acknowledge that it's an imperfect and complicated system and we are striving to make improvements which reduce the potential impacts of this unsold stock on people and planet,' said a spokesperson. However, despite widespread acknowledgement of the problem, it continues to grow—owing partly to an increasingly affluent East Asia. Bales arriving from China are typically bigger and cheaper, says Agbofah, due to an abundance of rejected factory samples. 'The Chinese see the bigger business opportunity,' he says. 'They want to push out the U.K. and U.S. So it's getting worse.' 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The impetus is also on apparel firms to produce higher quality products that don't fade or fall apart in months, as well as for consumers to wear clothes for longer, repair rather than discard old garments, and only deposit still wearable items into those recycling bins. Nations like Ghana are tired of being the world's dumping ground, although Agbofah is not naïve enough to want the containers to just stop arriving. His dream is to help seed a truly circular economy whereby his compatriots can safely, cleanly and with dignity turn garbage into gold. 'We're not trying to stop the importation of used goods, but we're trying to make it fair and better, where everybody wins,' says Agbofah. 'That can only happen if there is a connection between local traders and the source.' Write to Charlie Campbell at Solve the daily Crossword
