Marcella Brancaforte and Alhassan Selmi

An exhibition to listen to a voice that comes from a tormented land, Gaza.

L’OFFICINA has hosted an exhibition that travels around minor Italy, parish halls, cultural clubs, where together we are concerned with listening to the suffering of others and doing what we can in our small way to alleviate it.

Marcella Brancaforte used pastels to illustrate the experience of a thirty-year-old man, Alhassan Selmi, a journalist who writes to her from Gaza, where he is trying to survive.
Theirs is a form of resistance that does not leave us indifferent, a resistance that needs the support of ordinary people, those who do not have their finger on the button that sows death, but who have their heart in the right place and cannot help but be indignant at the barbarity that surrounds us. 

Three days after our meeting, Ali Rashid who had translated for us Alhassan’s words online, has passed away, we share a poem to pay tribute to him.

For ALI RASHID

At night 

death reveals itself,

dressed in red,

and breaks a heart

already too tried.

Gently

the dove takes flight,

white with mourning,

golden with hope.

Once 

we were brothers

and we will be 

again

when the olive tree,

stubborn,
is reborn 

from the ashes.

You now rest 

in front of 

the stone house,

with your large community

whose lives 

were taken away.

Your contact details,

on a piece of paper

carefully folded,

like a portal

to continue 

endlessly

a conversation 

that had just begun

about our being onions,

multiple layers of identity.

At night

it came 

for you, Ali,

the death of the righteous;

for us,

the duty to remember

and to cry out;

to wield, 

as the only 

admissible weapon,

the olive branch.

Rosenda