We meet in the graffiti-covered streets of southern Tel Aviv, each of us carrying a different kind of history, shaped by experiences that left deep scars. We recognize something in each other immediately—not an explanation, but a resonance. What we bring into the world is not only who we are, but what we have survived. Art, for us, is never a hobby. It is language. It is endurance. It is the only way we know how to translate what cannot be plainly spoken.
Our connection forms quickly, with intensity and recognition at its center. We create together, talk endlessly, move between walls, studios, and streets, always returning to the act of making. Through art, we begin to build a life, not separate from our histories, but made from them. Eventually, we leave Israel for New York.
We arrive with urgency and hope, searching for a place where we can simply be artists, where identity is not constantly weighed down by politics, memory, and inherited narratives. New York is unstable, unpredictable, often difficult—but it is also full of possibility. We struggle financially, yet we feel something we have not felt in a very long time: openness. We begin imagining a future that includes not only survival and creation, but also the possibility of family. Then war breaks out in Israel.
The distance we believed we had built collapses instantly. From afar, we watch events unfold with a sense of helplessness that is physical, immediate, and inescapable. When civilians are taken hostage, we reach for the only language we trust. We create posters. We design simple images of faces, names, presence. We print them out and begin hanging them all over the streets of Manhattan, sharing them online, hoping that someone will stop, look, and remember what is at risk of being forgotten.
What happens next is immediate and beyond anything we could have anticipated. The posters begin to spread. Volunteers across the world download them, print them, hang them in their own cities. Images appear in places we have never been. Social media amplifies everything. What began as a small artistic response becomes a global grassroots action almost over night.
Within weeks, we find ourselves at the center of a movement that is no longer ours alone. Media outlets call constantly. Interviews multiply. Public figures hold the posters up to cameras. Demonstrations, projections, and coordinated actions appear across continents. The campaign grows faster than our ability to understand it, shaped by urgency and collective emotion. We become recognizable, not as experts or organizers, but as the accidental faces of something much larger.
At the same time, a backlash grows with equal force. Posters are torn down, defaced, and burned. Videos of confrontations circulate widely. Streets become a site of repetition: hanging and tearing, showcasing and erasing. We receive threats over text, email, and phone calls. Conspiracy theories circulate, projecting foreign intentions onto us. Visibility begins to feel less like reach and more like exposure. Our personal lives slowly dissolve beneath the weight of the campaign.
We stop making our own independent work. Days melt into interviews, coordination, logistics, and crisis management. Financial pressure increases. Emotionally, we carry not only our own fear and exhaustion, but also the expectations of thousands of volunteers and families who look to us for guidance. In the middle of all this, we still try to build a future that includes a child.
The desire for life grows precisely because so much around us is defined by loss. After years of trying, we learn that we are expecting twins. For a brief moment, something soft opens. Hope returns in a form we can almost hold. We marry quietly at City Hall.
In our wedding photograph, we hold posters of two kidnapped children. The image feels both unbearable and honest—an intersection of love, grief, and responsibility that we do not know how to separate. We return to work the same day. The pressure does not ease up.
Exhaustion accumulates in layers. Stress becomes constant background noise. Eventually, we experience loss—first one embryo, then the second. The grief is profound, private, and difficult to name. Publicly, we carry on. We give interviews. We coordinate. We function. Internally, we feel fractured, numb, and suspended. As time passes, the movement begins to shift.
Some hostages return, while others remain behind. Media attention begins to move elsewhere. Internal tensions emerge among organizers and collaborators. Questions of credit, authorship, and recognition create fractures in what once felt unified. We find ourselves repeatedly struggling to correct narratives we cannot control, as interviews are edited and meanings are reshaped. The sense of cohesion that once held everything together begins to break apart.
What we bring into the world is not only who we are, but what we have survived.
Outside, the world becomes more polarized. Volunteers experience hostility on the streets. Some lose their jobs after being filmed. Communities divide sharply along political lines. The act of hanging posters, once urgent and clear, begins to feel repetitive, uncertain, almost powerless. We continue, but something essential has shifted. We are both exhausted and unable to stop, caught inside momentum that no longer feels fully ours.
Then things become personal. Our apartment is broken into. Nothing is taken, but something nebulous changes. The feeling of safety becomes even more tenuous. Threats continue. Isolation deepens. During a dinner with a new friend, we meet a well-known medium who unexpectedly describes details of our apartment and warns us that we are in imminent danger. Whether or not we fully believe what is said, something in us responds. That night, we pack our belongings and leave. From that moment on, we live in motion.
We move from apartment to apartment, staying with friends, carrying our belongings, our work, and campaign materials with us. We stay only in buildings featuring doormen, cameras, locked entrances. Stability becomes temporary by design.
We continue working through instability. We give interviews. We speak publicly. We move forward even when we are exhausted. Life becomes a series of extremes. In the streets, we are met with both gratitude and hostility. Some people embrace us, cry with us, thank us. Others curse us or turn away angrily. Former colleagues distance themselves or speak against us publicly. At the same time, families of hostages ask us not to stop. To survive financially, we begin creating smaller artworks for supporters, returning to the very practice that first connected us.
Over time, the campaign loses visibility. Public attention wanders. Posters remain only as fragments on walls, weathered and partially vandalized. We begin to feel as though we are disappearing from the story we helped write, while others continue to use its language without acknowledging its origins. Exhaustion turns into disappointment, and disappointment into a quieter sense of betrayal. Eventually, we briefly return to Israel to settle up the life we had left behind. We sell, donate, and release what remains. After that, we do not return in the same way again. We attempt to rebuild in the United States.
Slowly, we return to art, not as urgency, but as a means of processing events and emotions. A filmmaker begins to document the broader phenomenon of poster tearing and the social fracture it reflects, placing fragments of our experience inside a wider cultural narrative. We continue to speak publicly about the hostages in screenings and panels, even as our own visibility fades. The campaign becomes less a living movement and more a memory, a trace of a moment when attention and urgency briefly aligned. Still, we keep going.
We decide to try one more round of fertility treatments, in spite of everything we have lost. We travel, we wait, we hope, we endure uncertainty again. Eventually, something shifts. We succeed. A long-awaited pregnancy.
By this point, all the hostages, whether on their feet, on crutches, or in body bags, have come home. The larger conflict in the world has not ended, and instability remains present everywhere we look. What remains is a question that continues to echo through all that we have lived: How do we keep choosing life, love, and creation in a world that so often pulls toward destruction?
