Art in the Rubble

Creating Amidst Collapse

In a blackout in Gaza City, Amina sits cross-legged on the floor, her phone’s dying flashlight casting a frail glow. She scribbles a poem on a torn napkin, her pen shaking as drones hum overhead. The words are jagged, about olive trees and blood-soaked earth, but they’re hers—proof she’s still here. Across the world, in a shelled-out building in Kharkiv, Dmytro paints a mural with scavenged house paint, a defiant sunflower blooming across cracked concrete. In Port-au-Prince, Jean records a song on a cracked phone, his voice raw, weaving Creole proverbs into a melody of rage and hope. These aren’t polished works destined for galleries or Spotify. They’re acts of survival, art born in the rubble of crisis zones, where creation is as vital as breath.

The Urge to Create

Why make art when the world is collapsing? It’s a question that haunts me as I read through contributions to Salt in the Wound, a zine collecting raw dispatches from artists in war zones, disaster areas, and places of upheaval. The pieces are unrefined—poems with uneven meter, sketches smudged by sweat, songs distorted by cheap mics. Yet they burn with urgency, each one a middle finger to oblivion. Art in these places isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity, a way to claw meaning from chaos.

Psychologist Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, wrote that humans survive by finding purpose, even in suffering. For artists in crisis, creation is that purpose. It’s not about fame or beauty—it’s about asserting existence. “When I write, I’m telling the bombs I’m not gone,” Amina told me over a shaky WhatsApp call. Her poems, shared in Salt in the Wound, are fragments of memory: her grandmother’s hands, the smell of za’atar, a child’s shoe in the street. They’re not just words; they’re anchors keeping her from drowning in despair.

Art as Witness

In crisis zones, art is often the only witness. News reports fade, aid convoys leave, but a mural or a poem stays, etched into walls or memory. In Damascus, an anonymous artist known as “Shadow” paints stencils of children’s faces on bombed-out buildings. One contributor to Salt in the Wound described finding Shadow’s work during a rare ceasefire: a girl’s face, eyes wide, staring from a gutted wall. “It felt like she was watching us,” they wrote. “Like she was saying, ‘Don’t forget me.’”

Shadow’s stencils, like Amina’s poems, are acts of documentation. They record what power tries to erase—lives, stories, humanity. In Haiti, Jean’s songs do the same. His latest track, recorded in a makeshift studio during a gang lockdown, mixes field recordings of protests with lyrics about hunger and resilience. “I sing so my people aren’t just numbers on a screen,” he told me via email. His voice cracks in the recording, but it’s alive, carrying the weight of a community’s pain.

Art also bears witness to hope. In Kharkiv, Dmytro’s sunflower mural—painted during Russia’s 2024 offensive—became a local landmark. People left candles and notes at its base, turning it into a shrine of defiance. “I didn’t plan that,” Dmytro said in a Salt in the Wound interview. “I just needed to paint something that wasn’t death.” His hands were blistered from mixing paint with ash, but the sunflower’s yellow petals screamed life against the gray rubble.

The Cost of Creation

Creating in crisis comes at a cost. Materials are scarce—paint cans looted, paper burned for warmth, phones dead without chargers. Amina writes on whatever she finds: napkins, cardboard, the margins of old books. Dmytro scavenges paint from abandoned homes, mixing colors with rainwater. Jean records at night, when gunfire is quieter, draining his phone’s battery to capture a single take.

The emotional toll is heavier. Art forces artists to confront their pain, to dig into wounds that haven’t healed. Amina admitted she cries after writing, her poems reopening memories of loss. “But if I don’t write, I’ll explode,” she said. Dmytro paints through panic attacks, his brushstrokes erratic as sirens wail. Jean’s songs are laced with grief for friends killed in Port-au-Prince’s streets. Yet they keep creating, because stopping would mean surrendering.

There’s also the risk of being seen. In authoritarian regimes or war zones, art is dangerous. Shadow’s stencils in Damascus could earn them a prison cell or worse. Amina hides her poems, knowing they could be labeled subversive. Jean’s songs, shared on encrypted drives, have made him a target of local gangs. “I’m scared,” he confessed. “But silence is scarier.” Their art is an act of courage, a refusal to be erased.

Is Art Enough?

I keep circling back to the question: Is art enough? When survival hangs by a thread—when food is scarce, when bombs fall, when grief chokes—does a poem or a mural matter? The skeptic in me says no. Art doesn’t stop bullets or rebuild homes. It doesn’t feed the hungry or heal the wounded. Yet the voices in Salt in the Wound tell a different story. For Amina, Dmytro, Jean, and countless others, art is what keeps them human. It’s a lifeline, a way to resist dehumanization.

Art also ripples outward. Amina’s poems, smuggled out of Gaza, have been read at solidarity rallies in London and São Paulo. Dmytro’s mural inspired a Ukrainian diaspora artist to paint sunflowers in New York. Jean’s songs, shared on X, have sparked donations to Haitian mutual aid groups. These works don’t solve crises, but they amplify voices that power tries to silence. They remind the world that people in the rubble are more than victims—they’re creators, dreamers, fighters.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that storytelling is how we make sense of suffering. Art in crisis zones is storytelling at its rawest. It’s not about resolution; it’s about presence. A poem on a napkin, a mural on a wall, a song on a cracked phone—they say, “We’re here. We’re alive. We’re still making something.”

Creation as Survival

As I write this, I’m haunted by the image of Amina’s trembling hand, scribbling in the dark. Or Dmytro, painting as his city shakes. Or Jean, singing into a dying phone. Their art isn’t separate from survival—it is survival. To create amidst collapse is to refuse annihilation. It’s to plant a flower in the rubble, knowing it might not bloom but believing it could.

Salt in the Wound ends with a line from Amina’s poem: “We carve our names in ash, and the wind carries them home.” That’s what art in crisis does. It carves names, faces, stories into the ash of destruction. It carries them to us, demanding we listen, remember, act. Art may not be enough, but it’s something—a spark in the dark, a flower on a crumbling wall, a song that won’t die.