Lines of the Hand, is a photograph part of the Sleeping Sickness (2012) project, originally commissioned by Documenta 13, and further branched out in his solo presentation at La Criée Centre for Contemporary Arts, Rennes. Like many of his projects, Phinthong relocates the resources from European art institutions to fund and shed light on the healthcare challenges in Africa and proposes pragmatic solutions. 

The project spanned three continents – Europe, Asia, and Africa – including Phinthong’s extensive research trip in Zambia, one of the sub-Saharan African countries affected by the sleeping sickness, or trypanosomiasis, transmitted by tsetse flies. The disease infects and kills thousands of people and livestock every year, and it is fatal without treatment. The first public iteration of the project was Sleeping Sickness (2012) shown in Documenta 13, Kassel. There Phinthong simply displayed a pair of dead tsetse flies, a fertile female and a sterile male, on a classic white pedestal with a glass cover. The composition in Lines of the Hand (2012) is almost identical to the setting in Documenta 13, only it is the artist’s hand where the flies lie, not the pedestal. 

Shortly after in Rennes, under the same exhibition title, he displayed an installation of an ecological and affordable trap for tsetse flies, produced by a Thai company in collaboration with the artist and other researchers. The ecological traps were an alternative to the irradiation method that not only eradicated the tsetse flies but also the surrounding ecological system. Another component was an edited video campaigning the irradiation method to sterilize the male flies; images were removed from the film, and only the sound and subtitles describing the original visuals remained, directly referring to the extreme extermination strategy. Throughout the exhibition, images sent by the local people who had utilized the traps to assess the result were also added to the display.