Aptart
I’m sitting in an abandoned garage, telephone glued to my ear attempting to contact a bank thousands of miles away. It’s at least 45 degrees outside, the wind’s raging and kicking up dust. Nearly in tears, I beg the man on the other end of the phone to track a transfer of 10,000 USD that was apparently sent weeks ago. I’m in Azraq, Jordan, in the middle of the desert and close to the Saudi border, and the project I’m working on has run out of money.
To understand how I got here I’ll rewind a bit. Several months prior, while working for a private school in the Kurdish region of Iraq, I met Samantha Robison. The director at our school deemed us both “free thinkers” with the most negative connotation possible, so we obviously hit it off straight away. When Sam mentioned over afternoon beers one day that she ran an international art organization, I immediately wanted in.
Sam started aptART, Awareness and Prevention Through Art, nearly a decade ago with some of her artist buddies. The vision was, and still is, to bring public art to areas that are recently recovering from conflict with a focus on community engagement. Within a year of starting, aptART had run workshops with former-child soldiers and painted ambulances that drive around the Democratic Republic of Congo to this day. Sam and the crew have run workshops and painted murals in Uganda, Lebanon, Iraq and so on.
I got to join Sam during our spring break at the Doctors Without Borders clinic outside of Moria Camp on Lesvos Island, Greece. Moria has become synonymous with overcrowded and inhumane living conditions for refugees crossing the Aegean from Turkey. While there, we held workshops for children alongside Sam’s longtime pal, artist Ruben Sanchez. Ruben painted several colorful murals on the clinic’s tents and taught the young ones how to make stencils for spray painting. I had a blast assisting Sam, Ruben, and the Doctors Without Borders team. I was hooked!
When Sam mentioned she had a big project in Jordan coming up for the summer, I jumped on the opportunity to assist. For several months before our summer break, Sam worked out a contract with Mercy Corps that entailed hosting community workshops, painting six murals, and submitting video footage of the whole thing. Unbeknownst to me, Jordan is the third most water scarce country in the world. Each household has one water tank that gets refilled weekly and must cover all of their needs such as showering, dishes, and drinking water. Our aim was to address water-related issues specific to each community and encourage water saving practices.
Sam and I both touched down in Amman on July 8th from our respective holidays. After a few weeks of beach time in Lebanon, I was hit with the hard reality that I’d be living in a desert for the next few weeks. We had spent the previous week or two looking for housing to no avail. Apparently people don’t want to rent to a group of rowdy artists for only a month or two at a time. Our search for housing ended as Sam directed the taxi driver to the Canary Hotel in Weibdeh, a “real establishment” she claimed.
Our first few days were spent meeting with Mercy Corps about the “vision,” talking to the one shop in all of Jordan that sold Montana spray paint, and sitting at ridiculously priced cafes to get some decent wifi. I spent more hours than I’d like to admit staring blankly at a screen attempting to create a spreadsheet to manage our budget and receipts.
Next to touch down was Emad Rashidi, our videographer. Before the project really kicked off, Emad and I drove down to Wadi Rum and Petra for a few days, a trip I looked back on fondly as the project kicked on.
Finally, some days later, Jerry Rug, aka birdO, arrived from Toronto. He was the first artist we had on the project and we were stoked to get started. Sam and I had created a jigsaw puzzle of a schedule in order to get out of Jordan and on with our holidays as soon as possible. According to the plan, Jerry was meant to start painting a day or two after arriving and be on his way back to Canada within 10 days, just in time for the next artist to start his mural.
Jerry’s work centers around colorful animals and geometric shapes, and his sketches just weren’t getting approved by the contractors. At first it was the animal they didn’t like, then the small geometric shapes on the bottom left, the list went on. Meanwhile we were trapped in a cycle of running to an overpriced cafe for wifi, driving to Mercy Corps to beg for approval, then driving back. This went on for days until one afternoon we’d had enough. Jerry was set to leave the country in less than five days and he needed to complete the first mural in Mafraq. Frantically driving around Amman for supplies, we packed the car to the brim in spray paint, rollers, and the like and headed up north without the approval to paint.
Sam and I assisted Jerry to “buff” the wall the first evening, which is essentially putting down a base coat. We were all up until midnight and woke the next morning at 4am after sleeping on a tile floor in an abandoned apartment that a friend of a friend had offered us. While Jerry was destroying himself painting in the hot morning sun, I ran around in search of a toilet. I spotted an elderly man walking out of an apartment complex and waltzed over to him asking for “hamam” which means toilet in Arabic. “Yes hamam!” he answered and led me upstairs to a roof, crusted over with white stuff. Gazing around I saw hundreds of pigeons. Uhhh. The man motioned me over to a cage and yelled “hamam! Hamam!”
‘Does he think I’m going to piss in this cage in front of him?’ I thought to myself. ‘What kind of sick man is this?!’ I leapt back, yelled behind my shoulder that I had to leave and dashed down the stairs and out the building. Several months later, after visiting another bird-man’s haven, I realized that “hamam” means bird cage. Or something like that.
Back to Mafraq! We – or should I say Jerry – had 72 hours to complete a seven-storey high mural. Sam and I spent our time screening angry calls from our contractors who had seen photos of Jerry painting without their approval on Facebook pages of local residents. There was not an ounce of regret between either of us. Jerry’s flight from Canada had cost a pretty penny, we were renting cars for every day we were in Jordan, and paying for accommodation – this wall needed to get done.
Which brings me to our next big issue…money. Mercy Corps would not agree to pay us until a deliverable was submitted. Within a few days of arriving Sam and I had written the agreed upon press release and submitted several other necessary documents in order to get paid. However, we needed money immediately to start the project and we decided to front all the cash we had made at our jobs in Iraq – nearly 18000 USD between the two of us.
Jerry pressed on in Mafraq as Sam and I screened calls and waited for this so-called payment. It was hot, we were working 18 hour days, and just when we thought things couldn’t get worse the Jordanian version of the FBI showed up.
Emad had been flying his drone to capture footage of the mural, which, in a town situated precariously between the Syrian border and one of the Middle East’s largest refugee camps, was maybe not the best idea. Emad, who has an American passport, was born in Tehran, so these guys instantly became even more suspicious. We were asked to follow the men back to their office to “apply for a permit”. We waited in a room drinking tea and smoking. An hour later we left with Emad promising to apply for a permit. Another bureaucratic nightmare to add to the list.
On July 22nd, as the sun was dipping below the buildings, we all breathed a sigh of relief as Jerry hopped out of the lift and sprayed his name on the right hand side of the wall. It was done! The first wall was complete., Jerry was heading to the airport the next day and another artist would be landing two hours later. We felt accomplished and it seemed like it would be smooth sailing from then on. Despite the fact that Sam and I had been in Jordan for two weeks already and only one out of six walls had been completed, we truly believed the next five walls could be painted within three weeks.
We could not have been more wrong.
After finishing the first wall we finally received a payment of 10,000 USD, which we blew through in a matter of days, back-paying for the hotel and lift usage, leaving us broke once again. One day later we drove hours through the desert to a town up north only to be told we wouldn’t be allowed to paint. While working on the last wall of the project Sam and I were being harassed by a group of men so intensely that we were forced to work on a rooftop for several hours. Throughout all of this, I spent countless hours tracing the second payment that Mercy Corps insisted should be in our accounts.
I probably sound like I’m complaining, and yeah, I am. But there were good times too. I got to spend 24/7 with Samantha Robison, and she’s one cool chick. The artists painted some incredible murals reminding residents in Mafraq, Azraq, Ajloun, Irbid, and Jerash to conserve water – something people living with limited water supply are all too familiar with. Our team lived in a villa next to a bedouin camp in the desert for a week and I became a damn savvy driver, because navigating highways in Jordan is no joke. And last but not least, I’ll have the Arabic word for ‘birdcage’ forever seared in my memory.
-written by Tracy Denfeld. Art by Jerry Rugg, photo by Samantha Robison
If you’d like to get involved with an aptART project, take a look at their website or follow them on Instagram.
