Basel Zaraa
The Diaspora of the Sign: Between Word, Body, and Resistance
Basel Zaraa is a Palestinian artist born in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria. He moved to the United Kingdom in 2010 to join his English wife, whom he had married in Yarmouk. He is a spoken word artist, stencil graffiti creator, and musician, and has collaborated with international artists such as Akala, the Palestinian hip-hop group Katibeh Khamseh, and Tania El Khoury.
His collaborations with Tania El Khoury on the projects As Far As My Fingertips Take Me and its second iteration, As Far As Isolation Goes, focused on individual audience participation: through touch, music, and performance, themes such as exile, refugee journeys, and the mental and physical health of refugees in the United Kingdom were explored. These projects have been presented at over 30 international festivals and cultural institutions.
Zaraa has made art a form of intimate and political resistance, capable of restoring body and voice to those often reduced to numbers or statistics. After moving to London in 2010, he embarked on an artistic path deeply connected to the experience of exile, marginality, and the struggle for justice.
“Dear Laila” was born from Basel Zaraa’s desire to show his young daughter the house where he grew up, in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus—a place he could not physically take her to. This led to the decision to recreate it as a model, the heart of an installation that has been touring the world since 2022 and won the ZKB Audience Award in 2023. The work shares the Palestinian experience of displacement and resistance, exploring how war and exile permeate everyday life, and the domestic and public spheres.
An intimate, interactive experience to be undertaken alone, “Dear Laila” uses the power of narrated memories, tactile details, and objects to bring back to life a place that has now been erased.
Zaraa’s words and music, born from conversations with refugee friends and colleagues, transform individual experience into a collective act of listening and care. As the artist himself stated, “with every arm I draw on, I am trying to tell the story of myself, my family and my people.” The themes of exile, trauma, and alienation are addressed with a poetic force that never shies away from political denunciation. His works have been presented at over thirty international festivals and cultural institutions, receiving significant attention for their ability to emotionally engage audiences and transform listening into a bodily experience.
Through his words, music, and marks, Basel Zaraa continues to narrate the Palestinian condition from a diasporic and radically human perspective, transforming the wound of exile into a poetic and political gesture.
© Elettra Stamboulis
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