We sent two of our writers to experience Tania El Khoury’s As Far As My Fingertips Take Me. Here are their thoughts.
Mackenzie Manley: The premise of Tania El Khoury’s As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is forward enough: You walk into a room, sit in a chair, slip on a pair of headphones and stick your arm through a hole in a gallery wall. On the other side is a Syrian refugee; though your arms touch, you don’t see one another.
Relayed through spoken word, the story of artist and musician Basel Zaraa — a Palestinian refugee from Syria — plays as he uses your arm as a canvas. An interaction solely between artist and attendee, the experience is incredibly intimate.
His words and story envelop the room. Awash in ambient sounds — like the fleeting squawk of a bird, rhythmic chants or the distant crashing of waves — it later transitions to a rap penned by Zaraa and sung in Arabic, telling the story of the journey he made alongside his family from Damascus to Sweeden. The translation is printed in neat type on the wall opposite of the attendee.
As his story unraveled, I could feel a pen glide across my forearm and trace my middle finger and, later, circle just below my elbow. Despite the short 15-minute time frame, I felt myself dissolve into the background of his tale. And when I pulled my arm back, I was physically left with its mark.
Housed at Wave Pool, an art fulfillment center in Camp Washington, my experience was a deeply moving one. My slot was in the late afternoon, so yellow sun poured into the space’s windows, filling the otherwise wholly white room.
In a constant churning of news, we are told about the refugee crisis. But this performance invites empathy by asking its participants to simply hear and feel the story straight from the source: a refugee.
The final echoes of his story played through the headphones. Figures painted in black ink lined my arm, making their way toward a border — drawn near the top of my forearm. A boat with people descended from my middle finger. When I left the room, I compared my mark with others. Though they were, for the most part, the same, each carried something unique. On one, the figures hauled luggage toward their destination.
You can choose to wash it away in the end or carry it with you — wherever the day takes you.
Tommy McDonald: When I walked through Wave Pool’s side door and into a cramped waiting area, I lost my identity and was handed a sticker with my assigned time to put across my chest.
I donned the same stark white lab coat as every other participant before and after me. I had become “2:15.”
My identity and my story are inconsequential for the next 15 minutes. Instead, Basel Zaraa, a Palestinian refugee, will use the skin of my left forearm and palm as his fleeting canvas, which he contorts as he pleases to create his art.
While he silently draws, I sit still with headphones on; listening to his family’s heartbreaking multigenerational story of displacement followed by an original song of Zaraa’s.
The haunting composition played out in sections, alternating between soft, meditative chants and intense spoken-word with a rap-like cadence underscored by heavy bass.
Globally, whether or not to accommodate refugees has become such an omnipresent and harshly divided matter of political debate, but what most often gets forgotten about in these discussions are the severely oppressed and all-too-real lives of the refugees themselves.
As Far as My Fingertips Take Me forces its participant to literally feel and be marked by one such refugee. For a fading moment, the participant surrenders their personal space and all five of their senses to Zaraa and his truth.
When Zaraa completed his work, he guided my arm back through the small hole of the makeshift wall dividing us.
I discovered a circular border near my elbow separating his workspace from the rest of my arm and two or three small groups of faceless people — nine adults and five children — made in black ink, standing upright with backpacks on, migrating toward the said border.
On my palm, a small rowboat with smaller heads poking out from it met a straight line descending down from the tip of my middle finger and onto the boat, which almost immediately began to be washed away by perspiration.
After a contemplative minute, Zaraa poked his head out from the isolating wall, gave a subtle bow and told me, “Thank you.”
I thanked him back and he quickly vanished behind the barrier again. When the closing chants faded from my headphones, I removed my lab coat and our intimate experience had ended.
While I was merely “2:15” to Zaraa — one ephemeral moment of many — his story is etched into me forever.
Tania El Khoury’s As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is part of the Contemporary Art Center’s inaugural This Time Tomorrow festival. For more information/dates, visit thistimetmrw.com. For our preview story on the festival, click here.
This article appears in Apr 10-17, 2019.