A six-sided concrete wall stands on black ground in an otherwise empty, dark field. It is twelve metres across and five metres tall. Barbed wire runs along the top. One light hangs overhead; everything else is dark. It has no door.
The walk begins at the edge of the field. Something stands in the distance in one pool of light from above; what it is stays unclear until you are upon it. Holding the up arrow walks you toward it; the first wall lights as you get near, and you stop where the whole of Article 31 fits in view. Holding the arrow again walks you round to each wall in turn until all six are read. Holding the down arrow walks you back the same way. The next button on the bar at the bottom of the screen, or the right arrow key, goes on to the next stop without the walk; the left arrow key, or the back button on a phone, goes back a stop. Then the view rises to the roof, and goes in through the roof at "shh…", landing at eye level facing the passage on the inner wall. From there you can look around. Inside there is no overhead light: each text has a warm soft light of its own that comes on as you turn to face it and goes off as you turn away, and the poppy's own glow catches the floor and the foot of the walls. You land far back across the room, facing the first text, lit alone with the others dark around it. Going on steps to the room's centre and lights them one at a time, each a turn to the right from the last: the passage on children in Gaza living with life-changing injuries, then "Children in detention", then a graph of Palestinian minors in Israeli custody on 31 December each year from 2008 to 2025 (all those held, and those held without charge, the second line rising steeply from 2021), then "Children and sexual violence". At the centre of the three walls, in front of you, one poppy with a yellow heart grows out of the floor under a small warm light, with specks of light drifting slowly about its petals; "The poppy" looks down at it. Then "Go up to the picture" turns you to the drawing; a small strip at the side offers to play the poem. "See the collages" takes you back up and out through the roof and straight on to the collages.
From the picture, "See the collages" takes you up through the roof and flies you a short way over dirt and plants to the start of a trail along the edge of the field, and sets you down. Walking the trail, three large collages stand beside it one after another, dark until your torch reaches them; you stop in front of each and look up at it: first two women in black and white at the right of the frame, one leaning in to whisper into the ear of the other, whose head is a nuclear mushroom cloud rising out of her collar; behind them a chrome diner sits in bright green grass, orange mountains run across the middle, and a large moon hangs in a starfield; then a sheet of orange desert dunes, curled like a loose photograph, with a family in black and white walking out of it towards you: a woman with a large bundle balanced on her head, a young man, a small girl in a white dress, an older woman, and a figure carrying a baby. They step down out of the desert into bright blue water at the bottom of the frame; a ringed planet and a blurred rocket hang in the blue sky above, and at the left the dome of the United States Capitol lies toppled on its side above the building itself; then, over a black and white photograph of a flattened city and its tents, a giant slice of watermelon in full colour, a man in black and white standing on top of it pouring water from a jug, a stepladder leaning against it, and four women in swimsuits standing round it, while a fighter jet crosses the top of the frame and a singer in a sparkling dress sings into a microphone on a huge stadium screen. Past the third, a black board stands beside the trail carrying the references for the text on the walls of the hexagon; a panel on the screen gives the same list. At the very end of the trail stands a sketch of the artist, Allison Mula, PhD candidate in occupational science at University College Cork and Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh; from there the walk can start again, or the scene be left.
Music is off to begin with: the ♪ button, first on the bar at the bottom of the screen, turns it on and off. It is "Light Beam", by the artist, fading out and beginning again, inside the wall too. When you fly out to the collages the music changes: "Ride The Mellow-vator" (lo-fi version), looping until the walk returns to its start. It stays on under the poem, a little lower, and comes back up when the poem is done.
A narrow dirt path runs from the edge of the field to the first wall. Far off it is loose and sandy, half grown over with grass; nearer the wall it is dark, packed and rutted. You carry a small flashlight that shows the path a few steps ahead, drifts from side to side as you walk, and comes up onto each article when you reach a wall. At the path's edge grow olive trees, a Palestine oak, wild sage, za'atar, rosemary and prickly pear.
Six articles from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child are mounted on the outer faces, one per face, met in this order as you walk round. Each one is lit only when you come close, and goes dark again as you walk away.
Beneath the article on the first wall, in smaller letters, is its source: Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989).
The word "shh..." stands across the roof in the roof's own cement, raised a little, so only its shading and shadow give it away.
On the inside of the wall carrying Article 19 is a passage about children in Gaza living with life-changing injuries. It has no heading. The whole of it reads:
As of May 2026, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that since October 2023 approximately 10,000 Palestinian children in Gaza had sustained potentially life-changing injuries, including limb amputations, major extremity injuries, severe burns, spinal cord injuries, and traumatic brain injuries (WHO, 2026). UNICEF similarly estimated that more than 11,000 children had sustained serious injuries requiring long-term rehabilitation, many expected to result in permanent disability (UNICEF, 2026). Revealing a substantial population of children living with enduring bodily injury, impairment, and rehabilitation needs.
Round the room to the right of it are two more passages in the same lettering, with the graph between them:
Children in detention
At the end of December 2025 the Israel Prison Service held 351 Palestinian minors on grounds it defines as security-related, of whom 180 — 51% — were in administrative detention without charge, trial, or disclosure of the evidence against them, the highest proportion recorded since monitoring began in 2008 (B'Tselem, 2026; DCIP, 2026). Across that year the United Nations verified the detention of 978 Palestinian children by Israeli forces and received testimonies from 66 reporting ill-treatment in custody (United Nations Secretary-General, 2026a). Israel remains the only state that systematically prosecutes children in military courts, under a separate legal system from that applied to Israeli children of the same age (DCIP, 2026; UNICEF, 2013). These counts cover only prison service facilities; no data exist for children held in military detention and interrogation centres (B'Tselem, 2026). Revealing children detained under a parallel legal order, an accelerating share held without charge, and an undetermined further number outside the record entirely.
Between those two passages hangs the graph, a framed print 4.2 m wide. It is titled "Palestinian minors in Israeli custody, 31 December each year", with the note "Number of minors by 2020 and 2022 omitted — no data published". Two lines are plotted against a scale running from 0 to 500.
All minors held begins at about 330 in 2008 and falls to about 130 by 2011. It recovers to about 190 in 2012 and sits near 150 through 2013 and 2014, then jumps to about 420 in 2015 — the highest point on the chart. It drops to about 275 in 2016, rises to about 350 in 2017, then falls away year on year to about 140 by 2022. From there it climbs again: about 300 in 2024 and about 350 in 2025.
Held without charge runs along the bottom, at or near zero, for the whole stretch from 2008 to 2021. It then rises steeply and without interruption: about 50 in 2022, about 110 in 2024, and about 180 in 2025. The two lines, far apart for thirteen years, close sharply at the end.
The readings are taken from the plotted points and are approximate.
Children and sexual violence
In 2025 the United Nations verified conflict-related sexual violence, including as a form of torture, against 9 boys and 1 girl from Gaza and the West Bank, within a wider set of 31 verified Palestinian victims (United Nations Secretary-General, 2026a, 2026b). Documented forms included rape with objects, violence to the genitals, forced nudity, and strip and cavity searches without apparent security justification (United Nations Secretary-General, 2026b). The Commission of Inquiry recorded boys from Gaza describing being stripped, held naked, and subjected to sexualised torture in front of other prisoners, concluding such violence operates as a systematic, state-enabled assault on children's bodies and dignity (Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 2026). Israeli armed and security forces were consequently entered on the Secretary-General's annex of parties credibly suspected of patterns of conflict-related sexual violence (United Nations Secretary-General, 2026b), which states these cases are indicative rather than comprehensive, given continued denial of access to detention settings and to Gaza. Revealing sexual violence against children operating within detention as a technique of domination, documented at a threshold the documenting body identifies as a floor.
On a screen between the fifth and sixth faces hangs the drawing "If Tanks Blew Flowers": a purple tank on a black and red ground, its gun pouring out flowers and sparks instead of shells, a child with a net standing on top catching a star, and a handwritten poem all around it. Standing before it, a small strip at the side offers to play a one-minute recording of the poem being read aloud.
If tanks blew flowers.
If tanks blew flowers, the schools would smell of jasmine and the hospitals of orange blossoms, and the children would grow gardens. They would make crowns out of daffodils and rub lavender between their fingers. They would bring bouquets of thyme, sage, and rosemary to their neighbors. If tanks blew flowers, the night sky would be quiet; children could catch stars. They could wish for children things, like dangerous machines becoming relics, used for climbing, playing, and stargazing, where first kisses happen and friendships are seeded. If tanks blew flowers, homes and bodies would stay whole. Families would stay whole. Dreams would stay whole. If tanks blew flowers, well, then all of Palestine would be a garden.
* The description of the scene in this text — the walk, the field, the path and the plants, the collages, the music, and the account of the graph — was generated by AI. The six articles, the three passages inside the enclosure, the poem and the references are the artist’s own.