In the town of Azraq, in the northeastern desert of Jordan, at a site scattered with rocks carved with ancient Safaitic inscriptions, we gathered for a spiritual ritual of tattooing lemons, using tools collected from the desert.

This ritual seeks to revive the bond between us - the inhabitants of this land - and the Safaitic people who passed through here in the fourth century BCE, leaving their inscriptions on stones laden with messages to God, to those who lived with them, and to those who would come after.

This act questions the colonial legacy embedded in the way it shaped how we relate to archaeological remains — a legacy that has turned them into museum exhibits, severed from their connection to the people of the land, rendered as objects for visual and touristic consumption, detached from local memory and cultural identity.

The act of carving on lemons, in the context of this landscape, is an attempt to reconnect with the traces of the past as living parts of everyday life, rather than as dead relics. And so we tattooed lemons with symbols and letters through which we told God about the life we are living, and those with we live with.

This is an extension to the work Hejabāt Kheshkhash, 2025  

I continue to develop this work during my artistic residency at MMAG Foundation