Break the Silence Mural Project

 Susan Greene, of Break the Silence Mural Project  (the name is coincidentally similar to, but not connected to,  Breaking the Silence, a project asking Israeli soldiers involved with the war on Palestinians to speak about their experiences) gave a talk in Olympia Washington about Rafah, about bulldozed orange groves in Bil'in, about murals for peace, about people whose entire neighborhoods have been destroyed. This is a mural she painted with others a few years ago for the Amer family. Their home is completely surrounded by the wall. The only way they have survived is by all the attention they have had in the resistance movement. Greene worked with a collective and and with local children. The artists and the people helping them were driven away before they could finish the blue sky, but with the left over paint, the woman living next to the wall (and surrounded by the wall) had painted her own bedroom blue. She had brought the sky into her room.
Is this not an act of resistance to power, an act of bare life that is insisting on itself as something more. Perhaps people will argue that it is a useless decoration of an inevitable fact on the ground.
Greene is currently working with the Rachel Corrie Foundation painting a mural in Olympia Washington for the Olympia-Rafah sister city project.