New Gaza Monologues

Collective performance and live reading, Venice, 2026

^{The New Gaza Monologues 2024 is an ongoing project by ASHTAR Theatre, bringing together nineteen new testimonies by the Gaza Monologues Authors. Many of the authors first wrote for The Gaza Monologues as teenagers; in 2024, they returned with new accounts of their lives in Gaza.

In Venice, members of the Anam Cara Collective brought these testimonies into a two-hour collective performance and staged reading at SALE Docks, joined by members of the audience. Voices moved from one person to another, allowing the boundary between reading and listening, performer and audience, to gradually shift.

Over the course of those two hours, we shared a space of silence, pain, solidarity, resilience, and hope. Some words were spoken aloud; others were followed by silence. The duration mattered. We remained together with the testimonies rather than moving quickly away from what we had heard.

For Dalia Jacobs, performing in Arabic carried a particular intimacy. As a Palestinian artist, her voice joined the other voices in the room in carrying testimonies written from Gaza in their original language. The performance became not only an act of reading, but of gathering around words written to travel beyond the conditions in which they were lived.

For two hours, the room held these voices together: those who wrote, those who read, and those who came to listen.

Presented
Venice International Performance Art Week — Sa.L.e Docks, Venice, Italy, 2026

Project
The New Gaza Monologues 2024 — an ongoing project by ASHTAR Theatre

Texts
Testimonies by the Gaza Monologues Authors

Photography
Lorenza Cini

Special thanks
Andrea Pagnes and Verena Stenke (VestAndPage), for creating and holding the space for this collective performance, listening, and solidarity.}