I Am Still Alive: Dispatches from Gaza
A reading & discussion with Mahmoud M. Al-Shaer and Skye Arundhati Thomas

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Red Teja, and Desperate Literature present I Am Still Alive: Dispatches from Gaza, an in-person event in which the author of the newly published I Am Still Alive, Mahmoud M. Al-Shaer, and Skye Arundhati Thomas, editor of Palestine is everywhere, will be in conversation about writing under siege, memory, survival, and the ways language continues to carry us across destruction, exile, and through new geographies.

I Am Still Alive documents life during the ongoing war in Gaza with breathtaking clarity and devastating intimacy. Composed as a series of dispatches written since January 11, 2024, the author uses his voice to record his struggle to hold onto words in resistance to erasure while bearing witness to unbearable violence. These texts offer not just a relentless chronicle of destruction, but a vital affirmation of presence, relation, and survival amidst the unspeakable catastrophes unfolding in Gaza. The book refuses the daily cruelty imposed by war and human rights violations, and demands that the world pay attention. Each page pulses with an utterance that insists: I am still alive.

Palestine Is Everywhere (co-published by Silver Press & TBA21), for its part, includes vital dispatches from Palestinian contributors in Gaza, as well as academic essays, poems, protest chronicles, and letters from prison that weave together the rigor of theoretical insight with the urgency of lived experience. Palestine Is everywhere is a testament to how Palestine, both as place and idea, refracts planetary struggles within our current political condition and provides a lens through which to reimagine collective emancipation. Most importantly, it is a call to bear witness.

PARTICIPANTS

Mahmoud M. Al-Shaer, evacuated from Gaza last year, is a prominent Palestinian writer, poet, and cultural organizer from Rafah. He is the editor-in-chief of 28 Magazine, founder of 28 Gallery, and a member of the Dahaleez collective. His work focuses on collaborative literary and cultural practices emerging from Gaza. Al-Shaer has coordinated numerous projects with international institutions such as the Goethe-Institut and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Notably, he co-curated the New Alphabet School at HKW Berlin (2019–2022) and presented installations at the 12th Berlin Biennial. His multidisciplinary practice often blends photography with text to explore memory and cultural resistance. Following the onset of the genocide in Gaza, he served at an IMC field hospital in Khan Younis until October 2025. This period of survival and documentation culminated in his book I Am Still Alive: Dispatches from Gaza (K. Verlag, 2025), which positions writing as a vital existential and political act under siege.

Skye Arundhati Thomas is the editor of Palestine Is Everywhere. She is a writer and editor from India, currently based in Madrid.