Know When to Hold ‘Em; Know When to Fold ‘Em
Fatima Al Romaithi and Lillian Deja Snortland
-A fragment exchange project, audience becomes artist, artist becomes audience-
In this safe space, Lillie and Fatima define and approach their vulnerabilities. It can mean something different for everyone. For Lillie, it means changing and being changed, both physically and emotionally. For Fatima, vulnerability is emotional risk, exposure, and uncertainty. These vulnerabilities bore a poem from Lillie called The Agreeable Woman, a personal allegory about a woman who folds herself over and over again to please others and be intimate. Fatima responded with two portraits to visually interpret, and expose, the sentiments she identified in the poem.
To let ourselves be seen, openly and authentically, fosters connection. Here, there are no barriers, of any nature, between artist and audience. We warmly invite you on this journey of self-exploration and interpretation, and hope you will feel comfortable enough to do the same.
Below, we offer resources for you to repurpose our creative fragments as you’d like. We have shared our vulnerabilities with each other, and with you, through our own interpretations: a Vulnerability Score, an unmarked poem, and two visual depictions created in response. The Vulnerability Score encourages exploration as you manipulate tangible art to create your own creative expressive fragments… discover your own catharsis, permanent or impermanent, ritualistic or irreverent.
Vulnerability Score
i. reproduce, sketch, copy, or mimic the artists’ fragments as you’d like. repurpose pages of your own life.
ii. feel the paper between your hands. take a moment.
iii. play. fold, rip, create lines, ignore them, cross them, white them out, colour them up. you can scratch them with a kitchen knife or stick them with honey, or stomp them beneath your feet.
iv. look at your creation. accept it as something you made exist, without judgment.
v. play again, or add a new layer to your creation. do you have anything you’d like to slip between those layers? a note, a signature, an image?
vi. what do you wish you could say, but you tie it up in a knot and leave it in your throat? what do you want to say to your past, present, or future? savour those words, and mark your creation in some way that reminds you of those sentiments.
vii. how can you soothe those thoughts and help them sleep? how can you meet them— what element or ritual might allow them to leave your body and enter the world? in water, fire, earth, air? do you wish to display them or cleanse them? make those elements as real as you can.
viii. record your journey or your method so this can serve as a guide to meeting any discomfort, the unseen, or the unsaid. repeat these steps as many times as you’d like.
ix. thank yourself. thank your emotions.
x. we thank you for your vulnerability.
Raw Resources
We have included our personal treatments and annotated Vulnerability Scores of the fragment exchange project at @fragment.exchange or #fragmentexchangeproject on Instagram.
To share your journey and exchange your fragments with others in our community, you may tag or hashtag that Instagram.
Fatima Al Romaithi is a visual artist based in the UAE. In 2020, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History and a minor in Engineering from NYUAD. Her desire for personal and professional growth led her back to NYUAD to pursue higher education and is currently a first-year MFA student. Her practice is 2D-based, using graphite and charcoal to capture expressive and vulnerable moments in time.
Lillian Deja Snortland is an African-American writer of speculative fiction, poetry, and essays exploring themes of fantasy, mythology, surrealism, and the imaginative feminine. At Carleton College, she studied storytelling and material culture of the past through Classical Studies, French literature and media, and art history, and she continues to play with a multidisciplinary perspective in her analysis today. In the last few years, she has facilitated panel discussions, written blog posts for Amplify Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, and contributed to a collaborative publication from the 2021 Alternate Currents Working Group, Given All This: Collective Institutional Futures; she is pursuing an MFA in Nonfiction from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.
This project was developed as part of the 2021 edition of the Virtual Collaborative Program for Emerging Artists, jointly presented by Exit 11 Performing Arts Company and Postscript Magazine. It is presented as part of Exit 11’s exhibition, Peripheries.
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