Joud Toamah
River Witness شهادة نهر
How do we listen to a river’s witness to systematic dispossession, erasure and resistance? Where do the waters of a drying river go?
River Witness is a multidisciplinary research project that reconfigures writing, video-making and sound to listen to the Euphrates river as a living witness. The drying state of the river is entangled with technologies of war, controlling infrastructures and violences of the fallen Assad regime and its aftermath. An active witness to environmental necropolitics, extractivism and enduring resistance.
Rooted in local water practices, collective and personal memory, this research seeks to amplify presences that resist erasure and marginalisation, calling to dislocate the violences along the Euphrates’ banks – acts of ecological destruction, militarisation, continued marginalisation and imperialist greed.
Through a multidisciplinary methodology, I weave together field recordings, video collage, multimedia publishing, Euphratean poetry and sound, alongside whispered ruqyah prayers spoken over fear-soothing bowls passed down through generations.
The collapse of the Assad regime dictatorship, which happens mid-research, deeply impacted my practice, prompting a reconfiguration of my artistic language. I draw inspiration from Anas Younes’ concept of the narrative as a hammer, where language embraces multiplicity, confusion and fragmentation to resist silence and official discourse through honest, unfinished stories. Through this method, I explored visuality, sound making and writing in the development of a multidisciplinary artistic practice.
River Witness is a living, continuous process – fluid, porous, and shifting across time and space. It evolves through shared research, collaborations and multiple forms of publishing. Through this work, I inhabit futures amid catastrophe – drawing on Arab Futurism to look back at dictatorship and forward toward reparative, re-enchanted futures along the Euphrates.
I am a graphic designer and research-based artist born in Syria and currently based in Belgium. I work across moving image, publishing and sound. My practice engages with memory regimes centred along the Euphrates River in contexts of erasure and against histories of militarism, displacement and ecological transformation. Through fragmented archives, transmission and relation, I explore poetic gestures of re-membrance and forms of knowledge that emerge through collaboration and acts of imagining otherwise.