As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is an encounter through a wall between an audience member and a refugee. Their arms touch without seeing each other. The refugee will mark the audience member by drawing on their arm. The audience member will listen to those who have recently challenged border discrimination. The marking can be kept or washed away.

Tania El Khoury commissioned musician and street artist Basel Zaraa, who was born a Palestinian refugee in Syria, to record a rap song inspired by the journey his sisters made from Damascus to Sweden. Through touch and sound, this intimate encounter explores empathy and whether we need to literally “feel” a refugee in order to understand the effect of border discrimination on people’s lives.

Our fingertips facilitate touch and sensations, but are also used by authorities to track many of us. In today’s Europe, a refugee’s journey can be set as far as their fingertips take them. The Dublin Regulation mandated a fingerprinting database across Europe for all refugees and migrants. The regulation often means that a refugee is sent back to where their fingerprints were first recorded, without any regard to their needs, desires or plans.

In In Defiance, Basel Zaraa raps in Arabic:

Crossing the border means leaving behind a 75% chance of death
Not from random shelling, barrel bombs, or even whippings
You enter, and just like everyone else, you nod your head
With each rejection
Say what you like, but all this won’t cost you more than $1000
Don’t ask me why or for what
Half of it bribes for the army and the police in Turkey
And the rest to live on and for the guys to get drunk with
Then it’s just your luck with the sea
In short, you either beat it, or it beats you
This part will also cost you $1000
In the boats, all the faces are stressed
Holding their breaths
Bracing their wounds
They’ve heard so much gunfire
They no longer feel anything
They no longer feel anything

Writing about the performance in The Guardian, art critic Lyn Gardner explained: “His tale doesn’t just touch me in a fleeting way – as the many stories and images reported in the newspapers do – it goes further. It marks me. For the next few days I will carry it around with me. It is part of me, not easily ignored or washed away. Every time I roll up my sleeves or wash my hands I am confronted by the images and rerun Zaraa’s story in my mind. I can’t get away from it.”

Journalist Lorna Irvine wrote in The List: “Every single delicate stroke of the pen’s nib carries weight – each figure inked onto skin represents the fight for survival, a symbol of solidarity, and the music is elegiac yet defiant, a beautiful testament to a struggle rewritten each day. And unlike the ink across the forearm, these struggles can never be erased.”

Credits

Song: Basel Zaraa
Vocals: Emily Churchill Zaraa
Music Production: Pete Churchill
Flute and Clarinet: Katie Stevens

Production: “On the Move” LIFT 2016 in collaboration with the Royal Court Theatre