NelNel

KNOW THEIR NAMES

Demanding justice with every name

Self-initiated + Collab w/ Plant an Olive Tree

2025

Project info

As mass murder mounted in Gaza, the silence surrounding Palestinian killings became deafening. Mainstream media failed to name the dead. Western governments looked away—while continuing to fund the brutal military campaign. In the face of this erasure, Know Their Names was created as a digital archive and activist tool: a refusal to forget, and a demand to be heard.

Built in collaboration with Plant an Olive Tree, the platform transforms names of those killed—sourced from Gaza’s Ministry of Health and Government Media Office—into generative visual protest signs. Users can browse the live archive and, with a single click, generate a downloadable image for print or digital use: a placard, a poster, a shareable post. Designed in only black and red, each name becomes a bold, immediate act of remembrance and resistance.

The project functions both as a memorial and a tool for direct action. Alongside the platform, we launched a nationwide campaign that reached over 450.000 people online and led to more than 3,000 names printed and carried during one of the largest national protests the Netherlands.

Credits

Partner: Plant a Olive Tree
Database: Tech for Palestine
Advice: Studio Divv

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KNOW THEIR NAMES

End the genocide

Important note: The data used in KNOW THEIR NAMES is drawn from publicly available figures provided by Gaza’s Ministry of Health and Government Media Office. However, due to the destruction of infrastructure, the collapse of civil institutions and the extreme dangers facing those attempting to document death under siege, these numbers are deeply incomplete. As researchers have pointed out, in war contexts, official death tolls tend to reflect only a fraction of actual fatalities. Current conservative estimates using a broader lens, such as those compiled by Harvard University’s Dataverse platform, suggest that 377,000 Palestinians are missing or presumed dead as of June 2025.

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This project reminds us that archives are political spaces. Battlegrounds for how memory is shaped, whose stories are told, and what forms of grief are recognized as legitimate. Archives can reinforce dominant narratives or they can rupture them. In a global moment where Palestinians are not only being killed but actively erased, KNOW THEIR NAMES functions as a counter-archive. One that insists on visibility, humanity, and dignity.

Archives are living technologies of power, history and storytelling. Using this particular archive is a way to grasp what can’t be comprehended: the scale of loss, the weight of lives interrupted. It invites users to move slowly, to see the name, the age, the individual. This slowness is radical. It demands presence.

To engage with KNOW THEIR NAMES is to enter a space of spectral presence. Each name in the archive is a trace. Not just of a life lived and lost, but of something unresolved, something left behind that demands attention. This is the terrain of a research framework called ‘Hauntology’, once coined by Jacques Derrida and later theorized by (among others) Toni Morrison, Dionne Brand and Avery Gordon: the idea that the present is always inhabited by absences that refuse to disappear. The dead do not stay buried, not because we cling to them, but because they were never properly held.

In this way, the project is not just an archive, but a living hauntology.

Sociologist Avery Gordon describes haunting as “an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence makes itself known.” Haunting is what happens when what has been forcibly forgotten insists on being seen. The names in KNOW THEIR NAMES are not static entries in a database, they hold space to be seen, spoken and listened to. They interrupt the present. They resist erasure.

KNOW THEIR NAMES documents not just the killings of the genocide, but the failure of recognition. The impossibility of grieving those whom Western, colonial systems have rendered invisible. The platform’s slowness makes space for this haunting to unfold.

Many users have described searching for names that mirror the age of their own children. Others have said they could only read a few names at a time before becoming overwhelmed by emotions of grief and anger. These reactions are signs of spectral intimacy. Evidence that the archive is not cold or abstract, but a living thing that can be used to create change.

Archives are often mistaken for sites of resolution. But KNOW THEIR NAMES insists on something else: an archive that unsettles. That disorients. That refuses to let the living forget the dead and refuses to let the dead be reduced to data. It opens a space where grief is collective, political, and uncontained.

Perhaps it feels just as a small gesture: a name rendered visible, a sign lifted in protest, a click on a screen in the dark. In the face of such vast and systematic erasure, it may feel like little more than a drop on a searing surface. But still, it is something. A refusal. A fragment of care. A trace that says: they were here.

And we are still screaming their names out loud.