OTHER WORK: Performance

Counting Flatbread, 2015

Counting Flatbread is a performance and fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres and their work for Syrian children. Millions of children are displaced by more than four years of civil war. They need medical care, homes, schooling. They deserve what all children want and need. 

Seven year old Hamza inspires me. A refugee, he is not in school. Instead, he inventories bread at a bakery to support his family. In response I count with him. Between Spring 2015-2017 I wrote numbers in Arabic, counting the needs of these children and their families. I reached 98,141 on 538’ of vellum. Your donations went toward caring for them.

More info: Syria’s Humanitarian Crisis: A Call for Regional and International Response (PDF) published by the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies, January 2015

Counting Flatbread in the Main Reading Room of the Boston Public Library Hyde Park Branch, August 20, 2015

Nausicaa, 2011

Like Nausicaa in Book Six of Homer’s Odyssey, I wash at the sea-shore. Instead of actual linens, I wash an inordinate length of cotton-based vellum, which I hang to dry. It becomes the source of tales.

Photos by Karen Bobotas.