This work by Joud Toamah brings together footage from Mohamad Al-Roumi’s Bleu-gris—which documents villages submerged by the Tabqa Dam under the Assad regime—with found and family footage of riverside life. The installation forms a layered montage of time, displacement, resistance, return and non-return. The sound piece, in collaboration with Esmail Bnaoe, echo with the songs of those who found in the waters a site of love and separation—laments, lullabies, field recordings, resistance chants, and poetry from Abd al-Qadir Ayyash’s archives—carrying the visitor along seven passages by the river.

The work dwells by the repeatedly targeted seven bridges of Deir ez-Zor and the fractured waterways of Raqqa, which became contested sites of interrupted movement under tyrannical and competing military forces. It interrogates ruptures and erasures across space and archival records.

The installation invites the visitor to listen to what continues to endure along the shores. In this way, the Euphrates carries generational memories across temporalities, revealed through recontextualised archives and oral poetry, while questioning the forces that shaped and controlled its flow.