Image Descriptions:

Two close-up colour photographs of a pale person’s skin; in the first photograph in the bottom half of the photograph is blurred pink-red coloured flesh, with yellow-orange hard skin in the centre on top of the fleshy mound. Hooked into the dry skin is the tip of a silver metal tool (a stitch unpicker, used in sewing), which curves round into a sharp tip, which pierces the skin. Above the silver tip at the end of the tool is a blood-red plastic covering, which is brightly coloured and sharply in-focus; it looks like a drop of blood, like that which should be coming from the incision of the metal into the skin, though this isn’t visible. The second photograph shows the same pink-red flesh which is more in-focus to reveal the micro-relief of the skin, and the yellow-orange dry skin still in the centre of the frame. A piece of black thread has been sewn through the skin, entering from the left hand side of the dry skin (where the thread is in focus), and exiting the right-hand side of the dry skin.

Image Description: Two close-up colour photographs with metal callipers pressed against the face of a pale person, measuring the bridge of the nose in the first photograph and the eye socket in the second photograph. 

‘Aquiline nose, large at the base’  Burton, R.F. (1893). Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to AlMadinah & Meccah

‘Hollow Eyes’ Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)

Historically, travelogues of (usually extremely wealthy) white Western people visiting the SWANA region included many descriptions of physical features, and the practice of physiognomy or interpreting a person’s attributes and values from their physical form, and by extension the characteristics of a whole community and society. In Orientalist constructions of the SWANA region, this may include a broad range of conclusions, usually that they are ‘wild’ and ‘passionate’, or ‘untrustworthy’ ‘lazy’ and less ‘civilised’ as a rationalisation for imperialist intervention and colonial invasion. 

This assumed white physiology as the norm, and in order to differentiate people who looked different to this they were usually compared to food or landscapes in the region rather than as people, including phrases like ‘almond eyes’ or ‘olive skin’.

Image Description: A close-up colour photograph of a pale person’s face with a silver metal measuring instrument (sliding calipers) around their tongue. To the centre-left of the photo the person’s pink-red tongue is sticking out of their mouth, and held in the grip of the metal calipers, which has two straight metal edges that taper to the left, just above and just below the tongue; they almost look like blades of scissors. There is a blurred outline of their lips behind the calipers. To the centre-right of the photo, the calipers are measurements in black numbers (showing centimetres and millimetres), punctuated by straight black horizontal lines. On the calipers there are different metal parts of different thickness showing that it has adjustable moving parts, and small black screws holding some of these different parts in place. The cold grey-silver colours of the metal contrast with the warm pink-red colours of the tongue and skin.

‘Measured Speech’ is a phrase used to describe someone who is talking in a slow, considered and regulated way.  I’m interested in how we learn speech for communication, self-presentation and social acceptance. Speech, accent and pronunciation can be formed by experiences of race, gender, class, disability, nationality, and can enable access or be part of barriers to certain spaces, based on social assumptions and prejudices.

Speaking in  a ‘measured’ way can make you appear more ‘reasonable’, ‘professional’ (in some contexts), more ‘amenable or ‘emotionally regulated’; in a medical context as a patient it can make what you say seem more ‘believable’, that you have a ‘rational’ assessment of your symptoms and experiences.  In terms of psychiatric diagnoses, one of the criteria of mental health conditions or ‘pathologies’ is ‘dysregulated speech’; it’s contradictory that in order to communicate that you’re in acute mental distress, you have to do so in a way were you are self-composed enough to articulate this through speech. Many people with psychiatric conditions including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder describe how impossible it is to articulate their experiences and symptoms through language, like you’re being asked to express the inexpressible. 

In being a pale person of mixed heritage, I’m also interested in how people construct race through external physical markers e.g. skin colour, hair colour, eye colour. The history of genetics and categorisations of external physical characteristics (phenotypes) strongly ties in with histories of racism, white supremacy and eugenics. Some of the methods of analysing difference include Anthropometry, or measuring parts of the body, which was used in scientific racism to categorise and hierarchise groups of people and make assumptions about their ‘intelligence’ and by extension their whole societies as ‘civilised’ or not. Different kinds of calipers are some of the tools used to measure body parts in Anthropometry.

Drawings on Skin

After many experiments of drawing directly onto skin with surgical markers and other pens which caused some adverse skin reactions, I printed my drawings as a temporary tattoo. The lines morph with the skin stretching and form bubbles underneath the transfer when I sweat (more photos to come).

Image Description:

Two mid-range and one close up photographs of temporary tattoo transfers onto the pale skin of a forearm stretched out vertically; in the first photograph, the forearm is lying on a white table background, in the second photograph on a black fabric background, and the third is a macro close-up of the skin only. They are black line drawings onto a transparent background which shows the micro-relief of the skin underneath. The line drawing is one of the drawings included in the first post in this studio blog, which look like abstract versions of sinews, tendons, and neurons, twisting and winding. It almost looks like it is emerging from underneath the skin where the elbow joint and beginning of the forearm meet, like it has resurfaced and is loosely following the pattern of blue veins on pale skin, until it reaches a couple of inches below the wrist joint where it stops.

Pulse 

Audio Description:

The soundscape is a constant white noise that sounds almost like rushing water, with small and quick undulations underneath, barely heard.  The title ‘pulse’ comes from the quietly pulsating motions in the image and sound, and Pulsatile Tinnitus, a form of Tinnitus where you can hear the internal sounds of blood flow rhythmically beating with the heart. 

Image Description: 

A two-minute long moving image work with different videos layered over each over, building slowly.

A close-up shot fades in as water flows in from the left-hand side of the screen, swaying a mass of submerged freshwater plants to the right hand side of the screen; and back and forth again, continuously throughout the film. They seem to be attached to a rock or other material off-screen, and sway with the currents and eddies of the water. The gatherings of thin strands  on the plants swell and release, and are soft and feathery, moving in multiple directions with the current. Sometimes reddish hues and textures appear underneath the plants, which colours the strands, making them look like coral or like pinky-red flesh. Another layer of imagery is then added to the film, of the surface of water with shadows of reeds in its dappled reflections. Underneath, barely seen is close-up footage of pale skin, lightly stretching and folding. At points the reddish hues, swaying weeds, stretching skin and dappled reflections merge together, forming new shapes and textures. Towards the end of the film it becomes more apparent that the rough, red textures underneath are a close-up of a crusted red scab on skin. (The film-maker doesn’t know exactly which water plant is in the film, but it may be Willow Moss or similar)

About: 

I have been thinking about making the film component for my practice-based PhD and felt (internal) pressure to ‘step up’ my film-making in terms of a larger production involving a lot of complex shots; I can enjoy this process at times, but then it can feel unwieldy and insurmountable to get started. But then as Helen mentioned in one of our conversations about building in a Crip Methodology to the research itself, I remembered that why I make mostly (relatively) low budget DIY films is because they’re more accessible for me to make with chronic illness. The daily reality is that I often don’t have necessarily have the capacity to do long film shoots, and the logistics and communication that this involves; to do something smaller-scale and immediate (like filming in my bedroom or the park near where I live) makes working with film feel a lot more possible again.

A short excerpt of a film that I made but never showed to a wider audience; life events and other projects took priority so it wasn’t finished, even though I think about the themes that were explored in this (transnational networks of waste, medical waste, the chronically ill body and everyday detritus) often.

Image Descriptions:

Three close-up colour photographs in landscape orientation, zoomed-in to the surface textures of a pale person’s skin.

1. Close-up of grazed skin, mostly blurred except for an area where the image is in hyper-focus (roughly a strip running horizontally through the image), with red and orange hues. We can see part of the skin is red with blood rushing up just underneath the surface, and the top thin layer of skin is torn where the skin looks like it is starting to flake off. Black thin wiry hairs dart out of the skin surface mostly vertically, but also in other erratic shapes and multiple directions.
2. Close-up of skin, mostly blurred except for an area where the image is in hyper-focus (a diagonal line from the bottom left up to top centre), with some pink but also cold green and blue hues. The area in focus shows the skin micro-relief of furrows and ridges, which creates a pattern that looks like interlocking triangles. In the blurred part of the image we can see blue veins underneath the skin surface.
3. Close-up of skin with a callus in the centre. The photo has orange, yellow and pink hues. The skin at the edges of the photo is a paler pink, but towards the central callous it becomes darker orange and yellow. We see grooves in the skin surface all over, but the closer they are to centre the harder and more defined the ridges are. It almost looks like a physical landscape with clearly defined contours.

So Much I Want to Say (1983) Mona Hatoum

This moving-image work uses a series of close-up images of the artist with a pair of hands reaching from behind her to cover her mouth, which she is struggling to remove. Hatoum is a Palestinian artist who grew up in Beirut, and was studying in London when the Lebanese civil war broke out and she couldn’t return; this  work is a directly addresses the impossibility of speaking about traumatic events, such as displacement. The video uses images from her performance work of the same name, which was shown as part of Slowscan live satellite transmissions between Vienna and Vancouver (Wiencouver IV), where an image is received every eight seconds, and sound was transmitted via telephone. 

It addresses similar themes I was exploring in Aphonia, about speech, agency and the struggle to be heard. Re-watching this film in terms of research around c-PTSD, the freeze frames images remind me of memories that can’t be processed and integrated, and that return as flashbacks. The soundtrack is Hatoum continuously repeating the phrase ‘ So Much I Want to Say’, which is said gently but also with desperation and urgency; the insistence reminds me of the relentlessness of c-PTSD flashbacks, and the work explores the struggle between the need to speak, but speech always being obstructed. Given the current political climate in the UK, perhaps it can also resonate with increasing restrictions or censorship of speech, including speaking about Palestine and Lebanon.

Alpha (2025) is the first film by the French film director Julia Ducournau that draws on her Amizagh heritage (a community indigenous to North Africa).

It explores an Amizagh family living in France dealing with intergenerational trauma, addiction and grief, while the presence of a new virus causes wider collective anxiety; it touches on a lot of themes in my work and research exploring intergenerational trauma in the Lebanese diaspora, and experiences of illness and addiction, and the way the film is shot is intimate and visceral, similar to the world I’ve tried to build through making moving-image works. The film uses body horror to express embodied experiences of illness; how the virus can be spread and who can be effected is unknown, which leads to an atmosphere of collective fear and social stigma, drawing parallels to the peak of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and Covid-19. 

There are cultural differences in how they approach the virus, from the grandparents of the Amizagh family, to the mother who is a medical doctor, and feelings of disconnection when there isn’t a shared spoken language between Alpha and her grandparents— but there is also a through-line of how care is expressed through persistence and maintaining family ties, and the impacts of grief.

One of things I intend to try during this residency is to be simple and direct; in my artwork I tend to obscure and build layers around a subject until it becomes less recognisable, because raw pain feels too exposing to share. This is a small attempt at being more straightforward. 

While my Dad was in intensive care, I played ‘Li Beirut’ and other music in the hospital. He has Alzheimers and it’s said that music and smell can connect to memory more directly or differently; when I play music there’s a flicker of a deeper recognition in a way that doesn’t register when just talking. He doesn’t know what day or time it is, but he remembers mountains in Lebanon and streets in Cairo. 

This was in Sept 2023, and he is now relatively more stable. Only a month later the genocide on Gaza started, and I/we all saw people in intensive care being hospitals being bombed, families that look like ours; and a year later the IOF invaded Lebanon again (Autumn 2024) where my extended family live, and aggressive attacks continue on both places relentlessly.  

There are many different types of grief; the anticipatory grief of watching a loved one slowly become ill, physically or mentally; or watching a place and its communities that you know being destroyed, which is also anticipatory: watching the news constantly, waiting for updates. Though this is nothing compared to the grief of those living through it directly. An indirect, mediated and/or diasporic grief, where the physical distance can leave a feeling of helplessness if you can’t be there or contribute materially. A grief or longing that’s also entangled with experiences of violence creates a complicated relationship. But it’s important to reiterate that there is more than suffering: there is agency, autonomy and liberation; but people are worn down by successive decades of invasions and bombing.  Here is one of the mutual aid groups in Lebanon that you could support: https://chuffed.org/project/184290-lebanon-urgent-relief-campaign

Image Descriptions:

1. A colour photo of an old 7-inch vinyl record ‘Sawt El Eid’ by Fairuz in a paper record sleeve, which belonged to Teta. The record (the centre of which is visible through a cut out circle in the paper sleeve) is bright red with white writing which reads in English, Arabic and French: ‘Parlophone, Voices of the East Series, Fairuz, Silent Night’. The record sleeve design is green and white (which has yellowed with time), with a green stripe across the top and bottom with white text which reads in Arabic, French and English and translates (roughly) as: ‘The luxurious sound, Parlophone, Voices of the East Series’, and illustrations of a musical score in green. Around the central cut out circle are green patterns that swirl outwards, and translates (roughly) as ‘Arab music and songs’
2. A colour photo on a hospital ward, cropped to show two hands resting on top of each other in the foreground; the first hand underneath is a man (my Dad) who is lying in a hospital bed, wearing a white patterned hospital gown, and a white sheet up to his waist, and has an electronic device to measure his pulse attached to his forefinger which emits a bright pink light. My hand is reaching from outside of the hospital bed and resting on top of his. The background includes a white plastic hospital bed side rail, a white table and chair, a blue wall and wires.

Image Description: Monochrome pen drawings with thin black lines on a white background. They look like abstracted versions of sinews, tendons, and neurons, twisting and curving. They follow a similar pattern of emerging from the bottom left corner of the page, winding around and up diagonally until the top right of the page. 

(KNOTS) IMAGE DESCRIPTIONS: Three monochrome drawings with thin black sinuous lines on a white background. They look like abstracted versions of sinews, tendons, and neurons, twisting and curving. They follow a similar pattern of emerging from the bottom left corner of the page, winding around and up diagonally until they reach the top right of the page. 

In conversations about the residency, there was an emphasis on process rather than completion; I’ve started new medication this week, and as my body adjusts, my heart rate quickens and the neurotransmissions re-wire my brain, I have found that I’ve only been able to draw rather than make anything else. Drawing is always where I start in any creative process, even if it’s not related to the material I’m working on. Despite the conversations we’ve had on the residency about what we share here being ‘enough’, there are many internalised ableist assumptions about productivity, so it never really feels like it’s ‘enough’.

Hello/أهلًا

This is my digital studio; I’m an artist and writer exploring personal experiences of being queer, non-binary, disabled and part of the SWANA (South-West Asian and North African) diaspora to wider forms of structural violence.

I’ve recently started a PhD and have been focusing on writing, so I’m looking forward to be able to have some dedicated studio time again, and to experiment with physical making alongside research. I hope to expand on the themes in my research on collective and intergenerational trauma, colonialism, speech, language and silence as resistance.

Feel free to get in touch with me via the comments.
Bye يلا باي