Thousands of names written on a huge white sheet which, once spread out, seems to never end. On the seafront of the Lido district of Catanzaro, and then on the beach, the Palestinian Shroud was exhibited, a collective work created to transform statistics into people and restore an identity to the smallest victims of the conflict in Gaza.
Twenty-five meters of names on the seafront
25 meters long and 7.5 meters wide, the Shroud shows the names of 18,457 dead children, those officially registered and certified by the Gaza Ministry of Health between 7 October 2023 and 31 July 2025. The age also appears next to each name: the letter “A” indicates the years, “M” the months, “G” the days.
«Many of them didn’t even have a day to live when they were killed – says Ivan Marin, representative of the Carnia association for Peace and creator of the initiative –. The situation is terrible. The few people who manage to enter Gaza, especially doctors, speak of a truly catastrophic situation. Aid is not arriving, people are dying of hunger, diseases are spreading and we receive stories that are often not even reported on our television news.”
From numbers to names, the idea of a sheet
The idea of the Shroud was born precisely from the difficulty of giving a face to increasingly larger numbers. «I kept hearing about thousands of deaths and thousands of children killed – says Marin – but those numbers seemed sterile to me. They were told as if they were objects. So I thought of a large sheet on which to write all their names one by one.” Dozens of volunteers participated in the creation.
«Don’t forget a single name»
The large cloth bears at the opening the phrase “Don’t forget a single name”, taken from the book Shroud by the journalist Paola Caridi, godmother of the initiative. Each exhibition is accompanied by the reading of a passage from the volume, which transforms the moment into an invitation to collective reflection.