Malak Mattar portrays the desire for freedom of the women of Gaza – Catherine Cornet

Malak Mattar is a small, pretty, lively girl with two very intense black eyes, who already survived, at the age of only 22, the four wars that took place in Gaza. However, her status as a “survivor” annoys her, because since she is 15 she has been painting relentlessly: she has already made about five hundred canvases and wants to make her way around the world as an artist and not just as a survivor of a territory at war .

Thanks to social networks – which have at least virtually lifted the embargo that exists in the Strip – she has managed to make herself known abroad and exhibits in galleries all over the world. A traveling exhibition of his, which also arrived in Italy, allowed us to discover a very intimate female expressionist art.

Mattar’s obsession with tall, colorful and protective women, often bent over in an embrace, is something that she herself cannot fully explain: “When I start a canvas, I try to paint men, but then my hand slips away and they turn into women ”, she explains during our meeting in Rome.

This also has to do with the fact that she was born “in a cage”, she explains again. In the largest open-air prison in the world, Gaza, Mattar would never feel like painting plants or flowers, because the nature that surrounds him is seen as an enemy: “I live on the sea, but the sea is distressing, it remembers naval attacks and the fact that we are closed here “. The second cage she fears is that of a conservative society, that of Gaza, which has not yet offered her the opportunity to really get to know men: “I think I only paint women because they are also the human beings I know best: my grandmother, my mother are role models for me, even my classmates. I have had so few real relationships with men, they are a bit unknown to me ”.

Having lived through a long series of wars, she has also been depressed, like many in Gaza: “It’s a place where people look older than anywhere else, a place that seems to go backwards: the world moves on as we always and inexorably return. backards”.

Painting was clearly a way out of the trauma: very young, she saw her neighbor die in front of her, killed by an air raid: “When my neighbor died, she who was so sweet, so pretty, had never done hurt no one, I thought I had to die too, since I hadn’t done anything wrong either “. Painting allows you to make sense of this nonsense that is the Gaza Strip. She does not paint the destroyed buildings or the many deaths that have remained with her. To get out of the absurdity she paints instead peaceful, enveloping figures, women who become homes, grandmothers who become tents where they can hide, human figures who are her only real homes.

And if she really cares about being seen first and foremost as an artist – even if she is very active in defending the rights of Palestine – it is also because she fought a lot to get there and to find her own “country”, her own identity: “No one in Gaza is from Gaza! My grandmother arrived there in 1948 as a refugee with nine children and with nothing left. As a child they corrected me when I said I was from Gaza ”, at least art doesn’t need passports.

His international career, now highly respected, seems like a social network fairytale. She begins painting at 15 to cure herself of depression and anguish, she publishes her works on Twitter, Instagram, and becomes an internationally recognized artist without ever having left the Strip. Over time, Malak received messages of encouragement from around the world: “She was really crazy, unbelievable. I couldn’t believe it every time she wrote me someone. I didn’t speak English well and I tried to reply to people using the Google translator ”(at the moment on Instagram she has about 34,600 followers).

When she began to be invited to exhibit all over the world, the reality of Gaza proved to her that fairy tales are different from reality, since she never had the right to accompany her paintings: “I used to go to the post office to send my canvases, and I felt so strange thinking that they were freer than me. They could travel “. This is why a painting by her is entitled In my heart there is a festivaldedicated to a missed appointment.

His battle paid off. He now lives in Istanbul. After struggling with the family who did not want to let her travel alone, after coming second in the Palestinian general school competition thus managing to convince her parents, after the humiliations suffered at the Egyptian border, Mattar was able to leave Gaza thanks to a scholarship of study in Turkey.

Here too, however, he does not feel fully happy: he cannot take his eyes off the phenomena of oppression, from the dramatic situation of the Syrian refugees. It is difficult to break free from the internalized cage of occupation, from Gaza. But his desire to paint remains in his purity.