Palazzo Merulana is pleased to present How Kids Roll, an exhibition curated by Loris Lai and Joseph Lefevre, running from May 14 to June 28, 2026.
Under the patronage of the Dicastery for Communication and the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See, together with the Italian Committee for UNICEF and Save the Children, the exhibition — produced by B-Roll Production and Ramon Pictures — investigates the contemporary experiences of children in Gaza, conveying the strength, dignity, and resilience of those growing up in a context marked by conflict that continues to reshape the daily life, imagination, and future of an entire generation.
The exhibition is conceived as a space for listening, reflection, and cultural mediation, where the lens of childhood becomes a privileged key for understanding the complexity of the present.
At the heart of the show is the photographic work of Melissa McClaren, created during the production of the film How Kids Roll, shot and post-produced between September 2022 and October 2023 by Italian director Loris Lai. These photographs form the backbone of the exhibition, offering an intimate, non-rhetorical view of fragments of life, everyday gestures, waiting, and play — a childhood suspended between normality and trauma.
Alongside the images, the exhibition presents poems written by children from Gaza, collected from October 7 to the present. These unfiltered, direct voices enter the exhibition space as a powerful emotional and linguistic testimony, complementing the visual dimension. Also on display are photographs by Mahmoud Abu Hamda, a Gazan photographer and photojournalist, documenting life in the Gaza Strip from the beginning of the conflict to today. Images and texts interact throughout the space as both visual and sonic installations, amplifying the photographic narrative and conveying the complexity of childhood experience through words of fear, hope, anger, and imagination.
Two paintings by international artist Simone Legno (Tokidoki) are also featured, accompanied by music and sound design by Maurizio Cascella, created specifically for the film and inspired by its message.
The film How Kids Roll, currently in international distribution, completes the project as a narrative and documentary reference. Since March, the film has been available on Canal+ and is being distributed worldwide, confirming the project’s relevance and urgency beyond the exhibition space.
The installation is designed as an immersive environment in which photographs, poetic texts, and sonic elements engage in dialogue, creating a journey that invites visitors to confront not only the violence of conflict but also the extraordinary capacity for resistance, invention, and hope that emerges from the children’s gaze. How Kids Roll does not merely document a condition; it embraces artistic and documentary practices as instruments of cultural responsibility, forging connections between memory, the present, and global urgencies, placing childhood at the center of a necessary reflection on our time.
The exhibition is accompanied by a program of events for schools and the wider public:
- Fridays, May 15, 22, and 29 at 10:00 AM — morning screenings of the film followed by talks, aimed at middle and high schools.
- Friday, June 12 at 7:00 PM — an open event with a film screening and panel session to follow.
The exhibition design guides visitors through an immersive space designed for slow, contemplative, sensory observation. Lightboxes are placed throughout the hall, while photographs are mounted on the walls in a range of formats, from large-scale prints to small-format images arranged in mosaic-like compositions that invite close, reflective viewing. The variety of scales and visual rhythms creates an ongoing dialogue between individual perspective and the whole, alternating emotional impact with intimacy.
The photographic corpus — primarily portraits and scenes of children’s daily life — is accompanied by the collection of children’s poems, integrated into the space as narrative and installation elements, offering a second access point to the story: the direct, fragile, and powerful voice of childhood itself. Simone Legno’s paintings are displayed alongside a video of the artist’s live painting performance. Video screens throughout the exhibition loop dreamlike sequences from How Kids Roll, representing the intimate, unconscious dimension of children forced to live their childhood in a war zone — an audiovisual component that dialogues with the photography without overwhelming it, expanding its emotional resonance.
The installation as a whole is designed to place visitors in a condition of listening and proximity, fostering direct, un-sensationalized contact with the images, words, and sounds, and restoring to the photographs and the children’s voices a space of attention, respect, and time.
Leave a Reply