River Witness is a multidisciplinary research project that reimagines writing, video, and sound to evoke the Euphrates River as a living witness. The river’s drying body carries traces of war, dictatorship, and extraction, as well as echos of the endurance of those who live and remember along its banks.
Rooted in Islamic epistemologies, ancestral memory, and local water practices, the research listens to the river as both archive and witness, where the visible and unseen meet. The river’s shores become barzakhi thresholds: spaces of (non)crossing, (no)return, and return otherwise.
Through field recordings, video collage, writing, and whispered ruqyah prayers, River Witness weaves fragments of loss and resistance into a living, shifting practice. Emerging from the collapse of the Assad regime, it speaks to collective memory and reimagines futures amid catastrophe, toward reparative, re-enchanted worlds along the Euphrates.
Sound in collaboration with Silai Estatira.
Research developed during AdMa 2024-2025.
Residecny at Moussem Nomadic Art Center.
Photos from group exhibition ‘Wayward’, 2024, Morpho Antwerp.
Rooted in Islamic epistemologies, ancestral memory, and local water practices, the research listens to the river as both archive and witness, where the visible and unseen meet. The river’s shores become barzakhi thresholds: spaces of (non)crossing, (no)return, and return otherwise.
Through field recordings, video collage, writing, and whispered ruqyah prayers, River Witness weaves fragments of loss and resistance into a living, shifting practice. Emerging from the collapse of the Assad regime, it speaks to collective memory and reimagines futures amid catastrophe, toward reparative, re-enchanted worlds along the Euphrates.
Sound in collaboration with Silai Estatira.
Research developed during AdMa 2024-2025.
Residecny at Moussem Nomadic Art Center.
Photos from group exhibition ‘Wayward’, 2024, Morpho Antwerp.
