Translator: Marília Correia Reviewer: TED Translators admin
I grew up interested in borders and separation
because I never really felt their presence.
I'm originally Syrian, born in London, grew up in Dubai,
and now I live in Paris.
I thought that my roots weren't geographically fixed
but were more connected to the communities that I was a part of.
Having said that, whenever I'm asked where I'm from,
I've always said Syria.
I'm so proud to be from such a beautiful land
with such inspiring people.
And because I was raised abroad,
we would visit each summer until the war began,
and seven years later, from that distance,
I've grown to almost exoticize my own country,
dreaming about the intense smell of jasmine
from my grandmother's garden,
planting plums in the soil and eating cactus fruits, or sabada,
on the street as we would people-watch on these white plastic chairs.
But recently I was in Athens speaking with this UN refugee
who didn't believe that I was Syrian.
The way I dressed and how I spoke, she said,
made her see me as a foreigner,
and for the first time I felt outside of a culture
that I so closely felt within.
But in this context we were both foreigners,
dressed and speaking differently to our surroundings,
and that connected us together
even more than if we had had this conversation in Damascus.
So this feeling of outsider and insider actually became our connection.
Because we've all experienced what it's like being in both positions,
it's actually one of humanity's strongest bonds.
And when we look beyond the separation of where you stand and where I stand,
we allow each other to be more connected.
On an atomic level there is no peer division of space
between where you stand and where I stand.
And there's hardly a difference
in what's you and the person that you're sitting next to
is composed of.
You sit together as just two densities of matter,
and things that seem like solid objects are mostly composed of empty space.
Besides minute particles so extremely distant from each other
that they seem as though they hover in empty space.
I love this illustration of electrons orbiting the nucleus
because it resembles planets orbiting the sun.
Perceiving scale as interchangeable like this
can help break the boundary between the micro and macro world
and can also free the tensions between other polarities
like insider and outsider, or otherness and sameness, for example.
I'm a visual artist and through my practice
I aim to describe this notion of non-boundary
and therefore the interconnectedness of matter.
Years ago I heard a fact that I couldn't let go of.
And it profoundly influenced the way I work.
It goes, visible light within the whole electromagnetic spectrum
only occupies one thousandth of one percent.
One thousandth of one percent.
I was overwhelmed by how little we could actually see
and I felt a powerful impulse
to explore beyond that fraction of a percent.
This spark triggered me to explore the unseen,
not only of other wavelengths but in other scales as well.
By expanding our sight, we can expand our perception.
And when we do,
we can connect to the things around us in a different way.
So about 10 years ago,
I started using the light microscope and scanning electron microscope
to magnify and photograph my dead skin cells,
as you can see here.
I sampled from my fingertips because it's the part of the body
that connects us to the external world.
It's through that sense of touch that we understand the things around us.
The skin suggests to be a division of the internal and external body,
but what it constitutes
is extremely similar to the matter that surrounds it.
To illustrate this with a practical example,
since I came up on stage you shed around 100,000 skin cells
as you remove your arm from the person next to you.
That means one year from now,
you will have lost one and a half pounds of that skin,
which is probably one of the easier diets as they say these days.
I was able to explore the skin's elusive "boundary"
by magnifying my skin by 10, 20, 50 thousand times.
At this scale, borders broke
when a single cell resembled a galactic landscape.
I continued the shift in proportion by making these images
into large format photographic prints.
I chose photography as a medium to explore this
because it operates within the realm of truth
but a truth that I could manipulate.
And I liked that dichotomy because then I could create works
which would be considered more fact than fiction,
imagination or opinion,
even if it was staged or entered into abstraction.
And now I could visually address a truth of matter
that both the minute and vast share the same content and space.
I mean, if electrons, protons and neutrons do not have a definitive shape,
then nor will their sum.
And if these are the elements which inform the basis of our reality,
then within the language of human experience,
lines and their borders cannot exist.
I'm going to show you now that by visualizing or imagining
such a connected space may actually allow us to experience it
but the room is going to become dark.
Can we please turn the lights off?
Romantic.
As I'm sure you know, your pupils just dilated
to compensate for the lack of light.
But now the room is going to become bright again.
Can we please turn the lights on?
And now they've shrunk.
Obvious stuff, right?
Well, what if I told you that when I announce
that the room is going to become dark, your pupils already started to dilate,
and that when I said that the room would become bright
before the room brightened, your pupils began to shrink.
Our pupils can adjust by just the thought of lightness and darkness.
The mechanisms of our pupils
are helping researchers understand the connection
between imagination and perception.
This study conducted by cognitive neuroscientists
from the University of Oslo suggests that imagination and perception
use similar neural processes
and that imagination triggers some of the same physical mechanisms
involved in actual sight.
Therefore, we can shape how we see based on what we think
and how we perceive it.
I was encouraged by this relationship between imagination and perception
because in some ways then,
by abstractly visualizing interconnectedness
could have the viewer actually experience it.
So I continued working in the lab to photograph my skin cells
when glitches started to appear through the lag in the image's rendering.
These glitches became my way to describe the relationship
one has to their own internal body.
Inherent but unfamiliar.
We will always carry our bodies but we'll rarely see inside it.
I started to see these glitches
as vulnerabilities in the technology's anatomy,
abstractly exposing themselves.
Likewise, although we will never see our internal workings,
human emotions do physically manifest themselves
through involuntary malfunctions
like a stream of sweats on your forehead when you're anxious,
or your face turning red when you're embarrassed,
or a choke when you're lost for words.
This image is called Choke
and others from the series include Sweat, Tremble,
Twitch, Palpitate, and Blush.
I developed this tension between internal and external body
in this video work which records myself screaming
for as long and as loud as I possibly could
with a breath in between,
which was 16 stress-releasing minutes.
Because the film is silenced, it leaves the internal voice to speak
through the tongue quivering, the skin reddening,
the eyes tearing and the veins bulging.
But actually I had to reshoot this film because a neighbor barged into the studio
thinking something terrible had happened.
(audience laughs) So I explained
that I needed to scream for the next 15 minutes.
And he said, "Listen, I understand, it's a Monday morning.
I'm feeling exactly the same." (audience laughs)
And at the moment, I'm creating a new series for my next show
where along with my skin cells,
I'm examining soil and jasmine from my grandmother's garden
and soap from Aleppo under the scanning electron microscope.
When I first started using the microscope
I was most fascinated by spending eight hours
exploring something 1 centimeter wide.
I was also overwhelmed by all the details that we don't see.
I mean, looking is a choice at the end of the day.
So I asked my grandmother for a squared centimeter
of soil, soap and jasmine to examine.
And being a Syrian grandmother, she sent me 3 kilos of each.
(audience laughs)
And of course, I got stopped in the airport.
So I said that I was a farmer.
I'm not sure what kind of farmer travels with 3 kilos of dead plants.
Well, an unsuccessful one,
so they sympathetically let me through.
But with these works, I wanted to get closer to this place
which is no longer accessible to me.
I wanted to get closer to its earth and to its smell,
and to hyperexamine this invisible force called nostalgia.
But actually, the closer I looked, the further I felt.
I was lost into its abstraction.
Glitched and disconnected.
That same magnification made the landscape foreign.
I'm sure everyone can relate to being so consumed by something
or by a thought that you paradoxically find yourself with no perspective.
But in the end, one needs distance in order to understand closeness.
And when there's a push, there's always a pull.
And sometimes, abstraction can lead to clarity.
Being lost in a landscape of soil, soap, jasmine and flake of my skin
made me see and understand the connectedness of it all,
and that although they take different forms,
they're one and the same thing.
And that physical and metaphysical reality of connectedness,
can break borders.
I also hope that one day
this will extend to devaluing countries' borders,
and the arbitrary and elusive lines that govern them.
These borders shape a false otherness
and separate us from feeling as interconnected as we really are.
So what does separate us from each other and the things around us?
Very little.
But we do have a mental separation,
because it's hard to visualize where one stands amongst the other
when there are so many unknowns in between.
I had an art curator come for a studio visit last year
and he asked me a question that I had never asked myself before,
"What's at stake for you?"
I didn't understand what he really meant until after he left and then I realized,
absolutely everything.
Interconnectedness is fundamental and one of the greatest things about it,
is that it's a truth.
You don't need to be a scientist to comprehend it,
you don't even need to comprehend it,
because you know it, it's inherent.
It's in you, it's in me, it's in everything in between.
Thank you.
(Applause)