Wafaa, “…and Counting,” and Provoking Dialogue

After finishing Wafaa’s book last week, I became interested in searching out some of his other projects and also in finally seeing some of the YouTube videos he was making throughout the time Domestic Tension was occurring. I headed over to YouTube and was easily able to find the “confessional” videos and after watching a few I saw link to a video for a project Wafaa did in 2010 called “…and Counting.”  I could tell from the video’s title that it involved tattooing and being a tattoo appreciator myself, I headed over to that video to investigate further.

First of all, it is a great project and I think it conveys its message very well. “…and Counting” consisted of Wafaa turning his entire back into a canvas meant to commemorate the deaths in the Iraqi War. Wafaa says in the aforementioned video (to which I provided a link above) that he wanted to create a “monument” to the dead that he could carry with him and would not be forgotten. The project had three stages, the first of which was getting a map of Iraqi cities tattooed (specifically, he points out in the video, a map of Iraq with no borders). The second and third step involved getting 105,000 individual dots tattooed onto his back to represent the number of Iraqis and Americans killed in the war. The catch is that 5,000 of the dots, representing the number of Americans killed, were in red ink and were therefore immediately visible to anyone who saw the project. The other 100,000 dots, representing the number of Iraqis killed, were in invisible ink and therefore were only visible under a UV light. This was meant to represent how we almost never heard about the Iraqi deaths in the war and to signify how they had been rendered essentially invisible by going unacknowledged. Once you see his back under the UV light, the full extent of lives lost in the war becomes much more apparent.

Anyway, Wafaa may bring up “…and Counting” tomorrow in class, but I just wanted to make others aware of it ahead of time if they were not already.

What I really wanted to basically ponder out loud in this post is the nature of the dialogues that are provoked by not only Wafaa’s projects, but also by many of the ones we have looked at this semester, and also presumably by many of the project concepts most of us have been working on in our groups. Wafaa says many times in his book that one of his primary purposes with “Domestic Tension” was to create a dialogue around the issues he was addressing in the project. As he puts it, “to produce work to address this chasm between comfort and conflict zones,” but also to create something that would not be “didactic or polarizing” (Bilal 11). This is pretty much the exact same situation that Carol, Dan, and I keep coming back to as we try and decide a way to do something similar with our project addressing the gun situation in America. We keep getting stuck on the way overcome that whole “didactic and polarizing” part and to find the point where we can leverage in some dialogue. 

I keep wondering how to create these dialogues without them devolving. Wafaa says in this interview with Democracy Now about his 3rd Eye project that “a lot of people just think art is irrelevant” and ask “why should we care about that?” People with that sort of initial reaction are always going to be hard to engage, but what if we want to engage people with that sort of reaction? How do we prevent the dialogues stemming from these provocative sort of projects from turning into petty name calling? The comments on virtually all of the YouTube videos for Wafaa’s projects have many angry, nasty, ignorant things being said in them. Some of the people responding in “defense” can end up sounding just as angry and ignorant. I know that some of this stems from the anonymity afforded to people by the Internet, something which “Domestic Tension” addressed with the anonymity provided by shooting the paintball gun over the Internet, but I often imagine real life dialogues devolving in this manner, too. Much of the dialogue surrounding the gun debate has certainly devolved in a lot of cases. I know we cannot control how people are going to react to something, so I do not know if any of these questions I have posed could receive any concrete answer, but I thought I would put them out there for us all to think about nonetheless.