A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
An artist's young daughter asked him about his childhood home, so he built a model of it with her help - a building in a Syrian refugee camp. It's now set to travel the world. NPR's Jennifer Vanasco visited it in Brooklyn.
JENNIFER VANASCO, BYLINE: You enter a small office...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Take a seat, please.
VANASCO: ...And sit at a wooden desk. In front of you is the model house made of wood and glue and paint and four cards with instructions. You're told to press play on a cassette recorder.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BASEL ZARAA: Dear Laila, make yourself comfortable. I want to take you somewhere.
VANASCO: Palestinian artist Basel Zaraa recreates for us the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, Syria.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ZARAA: The gray cement, this was the color of the camp. It was a maze of cement cubes stacked on top of each other, decorated with electricity pylons, washing lines, TV antennas and Palestinian flags.
VANASCO: Zaraa was born in that camp, in his family's home in 1985. His grandparents had fled their small town during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, what Palestinians call the Nakba or catastrophe. But the story he tells Laila is intimate and often joyful because it's about the day-to-day life of his family.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ZARAA: Dear Laila, do you see that room on the first floor on the left? That's the room I was born in and where I slept for the first eight years of my life with your granny, granddad, Uncle Ward (ph) and Auntie Ferrau (ph). This was the late '80s, early '90s, and for me and my siblings, they were great years.
VANASCO: Zaraa, his partner and their children now live in England. He moved there in 2010. He says his family, still in Syria, needed to flee again, when in 2012, his family home - so lovingly created here with paint and wood - was destroyed by a Syrian government airstrike during that country's civil war. Laila never saw the real house. She's now 10. But last year, she finally got to travel to Syria to meet her grandparents in person.
ZARAA: The first time she saw my parents and, like, she taste the food from my mom, just like a few years before this was impossible. Like, this was just like a dream.
VANASCO: Zaraa says his family are survivors, but he says art is a way to start healing. It's too easy to remember only the tragedy and forget all the good times that were had in that camp and in that house. That's why in the center drawer of the desk...
(SOUNDBITE OF OPENING DESK DRAWER)
VANASCO: It's a photo album.
Pictures his father found while sorting through the rubble of their house of children and celebration and love. His father gathered Zaraa and his siblings in a four-hour video call.
ZARAA: Each photo, there's, like, a story behind it. So we start and remember the stories together.
VANASCO: When he told Laila about this when she was 5, that's when she started asking questions. Why did he live in a refugee camp? Why couldn't she visit? What was it like? This installation is Basel Zaraa's answer.
ZARAA: As Palestinians, our individual experiences tell political stories. And this is not something that we have chosen, but it's something that has been forced upon us by history. And I think I want to show how these historical events are experienced in the everyday lives of ordinary people.
VANASCO: The art installation called "Dear Laila," which is produced by the theater company PlayCo, is showing in different places in New York City through May 3. Next, it goes to Estonia.
Jennifer Vanasco, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAISY RICKMAN SONG, "SUNFLOWERS OF YOUR MIND") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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