Love is Resistance sews together 77 posters for a free Palestine from creatives around the globe

Love is Resistance is a book “born from the ache of witnessing”, curator and editor Aya Mousawi shares with It’s Nice That: “To witness is to refuse disappearance: an attempt, in a small way, to archive this time and capture the spirit of our efforts to stand with Palestine. To honour their resistance and survival, and to trace the threads of solidarity that connect us across the world.”

A publication brought together in just six weeks, in the wake of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the artist book gathers a staggering number of visual poems, stories, memories and messages of resistance in the form of poster designs from the past two years of the genocide – marking “77 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing, and 77 years of resistance,” Aya adds.

Presented among its removable pages, designed to tear out and take to protests, are 77 posters by artists, musicians, writers, designers, poets, filmmakers and actors including: Brian Eno, Massive Attack, Adam Rouhana, Marwan Kaabour, Jasleen Kaur, Jeremy Deller and many more – each brought together in a print to honour the resilience and survival of the Palestinian people and unite voices of resistance.

This incredible lineup of creative contributors began as a call-out to friends and colleagues of Aya’s amongst her work as a cultural strategist, producer and curator for grassroots initiatives and non-profits, before it snowballed into something with a much wider remit. It was important to the book’s editor to have a range of figures to contribute across disciplines. “Many of the book’s contributors are Palestinian,” she says, “the rest are steadfast allies.”

Each creative donated their posters to the publication with all proceeds from the project set to go to the Ajyal Foundation, a UK-based charity supporting education and mental health for children impacted by war and displacement, currently working with young people in Gaza. In addition to these 77 commissions, the publication also encompasses three posters of drawings by a classroom of children in Gaza, that the Ajyal Foundation has worked with directly. In addition to its on-the-ground support for displaced families and children, the foundation was able to facilitate the creation of these artworks as part of its educational programme for children aged between 7-12 in July 2025, where the classroom was provided a prompt by Aya to “draw symbols of Palestine that hold meaning to them”.

Designed by Tawfiq Dawi (Hey Porter!) a Jordanian-Palestinian designer based in Amman, the collection took its final form with a cover design inspired by early designs for the Palestinian flag and the colour of Jaffa oranges; a sweet and seedless variety of the fruit that draws ties to Palestinian land and its people. This orange tone immediately “felt vibrant and defiant”, Aya says. As a dual language publication, produced in Arabic and English, designer Tawfiq’s own typeface for Arabic calligraphy Kahaza (that took its influence from vintage Egyptian film posters) became key to the book’s layout, paired with a cursive Latin type for sections with English calligraphy. Tawfiq’s approach to the book’s editorial design also defied any conventional grid system or continuous visual string; each page was crafted to frame every individual poster, one by one with no overriding restrictions or rules for their expression.

As a tear-out book, Love is Resistance is “designed to be held together as an archive and for its posters to be circulated, moving across walls, streets, screens, extending its presence beyond its pages”, Aya shares. “That relationship between archive and action, hold and release, shaped the project from its inception.” The book as an object was designed to have somewhat of a “double life: as an object to hold and as a tool for movement”.

The book’s structure allows each poster to take on a life of its own in the hands of someone new, or instead, contribute to a larger archival narrative kept in company. Its shapeshifting nature makes it, what Aya calls “a living document, designed to hold together and to fall apart”, she ends. “The posters that form Love is Resistance become both record and action, reminding us that visibility itself is a form of resistance.”