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Play, download and edit the free video What Was Lost? A participatory art installation.

--This is a cross-disciplinary student project made in ATCM 6377 Creativity as Social Practice with students from LIT 3319 Contemporary Women's Literature at UT Dallas. All students and participants are credited at the end of the video--

What do you lose in order to gain?

Inspired by Safia Elhillo’s poem “To Make Use of Water,” this participatory project materializes each stanza, and invites participants to engage with the themes in “Dilute,” “Blur,” “Swim/Dissolve,” and “Drown.”

By simulating the immigration process, participants face echoes of what is lost in the process. A primary focus on language as signifier of identity and culture, paired with the act of losing or “forgetting,” creates a diasporic experience that is not easily reconciled.

Participants begin at an entry table that distributes “passports” printed on yellow document paper that is filled out as they advance through the project, receiving a stamp to indicate the completion of each part of the poem, one stanza at a time. By doing so, participants are encouraged to reflect on the time, energy, and bodies lost in the transition of immigrants and their descendants.

In dilute, participants submerge rocks with Arabic words in a bowl of water and watch as the words fade. UV light reveals the English translations on the word. Participants receive the Arabic word stamped on their passport. The process shows the difficulties of bilingualism, and uses a bowl of water as a symbol for how the Atlantic Ocean obfuscates the memory in this stanza of the poem.

In blur, participants reach into a bowl of water made opaque, an allusion to the poem’s “white water,” to pick up laminated cards printed with this stanza. After retrieving a card, participants dry it and attach it to their passport.

In swim/dissolve, participants are asked, “Do you have anything to declare?” However they respond, they will receive “I want to go home” as an embossment on the third page of the passport book. This embodies the point of no return in the immigration process, the desire to go back home.

Lastly, in drown, participants will use ink to stamp their fingerprints in the passports previously provided. In doing so, their hands are stained. Participants will wash their hands in a basin. This action grants the participants an opportunity to wash off their hands which were marked by the prior exhibits, and gradually stains the basin water. The staining of the water signifies that there is always something that is left behind in such transitions and journeys.

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