ADMA 2024-2025

شهادة نهر River Witness

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 evoke 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. I centre the river as a sentient body – a temporal and spatial realm that carries disaster, memory and the ghosts of past and future. It witnesses environmental necropolitics, extractivism and enduring resistance.

Rooted in Islamic epistemologies, ancestral memory, and local water practices, 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. The river’s shores become Barzakhi thresholds: liminal spaces of (non)crossing, (no)return and return to otherwise. Within this threshold, colonial borders, exile and locality are collapsed, challenged and unsettled.

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 artistic language – one that speaks to the personal and the collective. 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 imagine futures amid catastrophe – drawing on Arab Futurism to look back at dictatorship and forward toward reparative, re-enchanted futures along the Euphrates.