Grieving Doves is an open Berlin-based initiative that honours Palestinians killed by Israeli violence and stands for the liberation of Palestine. Since 2023, the group has gathered almost weekly to handwrite the names and ages of Palestinians killed in Gaza onto pieces of fabric. These names are later sewn onto wings and carried through demonstrations, public interventions, and collective actions as acts of mourning, remembrance, and resistance.
To date, more than 26,000 names have been written.
At the centre of the initiative is the collective practice of “name-writing,” a ritual of collective grief that resists the reduction of human lives to numbers or statistics. Gathering together to write names by hand creates space to acknowledge each person individually, strengthen bonds of solidarity, and make loss visible in public space.
The overall initiative is sustained through extensive collective care, labour, and participation involving many people across different stages of the project.
In Germany, where Palestinian grief is often marginalised, criminalised, or dismissed, collective mourning is deeply political. It refuses the erasure and dehumanisation of Palestinian lives and disrupts narratives that seek to justify mass killing. By carrying names into the streets, Grieving Doves reclaims public space as a site of grief, memory, and resistance. It asks the city, and beyond, to look and to feel, rather than turn away.
Name-writing is open to drop in and held most Friday evenings in Kreuzkölln/Reuterkiez. DM Grieving Doves on Instagram or email grievingdoves@proton.me to find out more details.
Installation at the (un)learning urbanity Symposium
From June 19–21, Grieving Doves will present an installation of wings, Filastin the giant dove, and photographs of the wings from different photographers within the Palestine solidarity movement at the (un)learning urbanity symposium at Floating University. Several from the collective will be present for the Opening Evening on 19th June from 5pm until 9pm.
The exhibition at the Symposium (un)learning urbanity presents artistic, activist, and research-based works that engage with the city, memory, belonging, and space from critical perspectives. They challenge dominant notions of urbanity and imagine new forms of living together.
