JAMILA ABDEL-RAZEK reviews Daughters of the River by Adham Faramawy, exploring everything from colonial histories to questions of pollution through the waterway.
The ancient Egyptian gods believed that before the universe was created, “a boundless watery region had existed… its inert, unmoving waters swaddled in absolute darkness”. Water has always been conceived as the source of all life, a sacred ribbon that ties and transports resources, land and people. But this very reliance on waterways has allowed for its exploitation — to become a source of conflict and, as described by Egyptian artist Adham Faramawy, a colonial artery.
Faramawy, a London-based multi-media artist of Egyptian descent, restaged their performance, Daughters of the River, as part of the Serpentine’s Infinite Ecologies Marathon this past July. Performed at Stone Nest in Soho, the performance entangles colonial memory and constructions of rivers and waterways, while equally tending to the love and ancient associations that cultures in the Middle East and the UK have to such vital, disappearing systems.
Originally commissioned in 2022 for Queer Earth and Liquid Matters, Daughters of the River weaves together dance, visuals, sound, poetry and spoken word to fluidly trace and tell the imperialist histories of both British and Egyptian waterways while creating awareness of our continued role in their pollution and erasure. Throughout the performance, Faramawy, joined by Folu Odimayo, Jose Funnell and flautist Sofia pan, wonderfully wade through and dissolve the geographical borders between the histories of different waterways. Accompanied by entrancing music and visuals of different rivers, they appear submerged within polluted waters, encircling each other with romantic and playful gestures. Beyond motions of wading through water, the performers continuously pour what appears as contaminated, muddy liquid over themselves – reminiscent to Londoners of the dreadful water of the River Thames.
Borrowing from Alexander Pope’s 18th century poem Windsor-Forest, Faramawy’s monologue over the duration of the performance begins by speaking to London’s subterranean rivers, “The Fleet, the Tyburn, the Westbourne, the Quaggy, the Effra, Neckinger, Earl’s Sluice, Hackney Brook and counters creek” and the ongoing pollution of the Thames. Covered in what begins to look like a second skin, the performers manoeuvre across the lubricated stage floor, simulating the very act of swimming. Illuminated by green lighting and covered in silt, I felt as if I were either in a subterranean canal or a sewer. Through spoken word, Faramawy tells the story of the Great Stink of 1858, where during the summer months of July and August the warm weather exacerbated the smells of excrement and sewage dumped in the Thames; however, little has changed, as Faramawy juxtaposes how in 2020 alone, 3.5 billion litres of raw sewage overflowed into the Thames. Faramawy’s monologue cleverly prods at the ongoing failures of the government, the complicity of industrial and agricultural producers, as well as the general population’s role in the pollution of our rivers.
As I discovered through Pope’s poem, The Isis is the original name for the River Thames (as attributed by the Romans):
“Who swell with tributary urns his flood;
First the fumed authors of his ancient name,
The winding Isis and the fruitful Thame.”
The winding Isis – an image that conjures not the ‘fruitful’ Thame, but the River Nile. For Faramawy, whose practice is based in London but informed by their Egyptian heritage, it is curious how two such waterways that are continents apart remain intertwined. As they explain, it is not just the names that connect the two, but Britain’s violent colonial rule in Egypt, where water was claimed and cut from the people to “quench” the thirst of cotton to be taken from the land. Under such systems of violence did the Nile truly run red with blood. Beyond the exploration of our role in the destruction of waterways, Faramawy further examines waterways’ ability to connect multiple lands together, making them sites of grave and fatal disagreement.
Halfway through the performance, the artists took a seat with the audience to watch an informational documentary-style film on the origins and conflicts surrounding the Nile (notably Ethiopia’s plans for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam). The inclusion of this short documentary seems to act not only as a call to protect Egypt’s “lifeline”, but also a cautionary tale, as it reminds us of the countless African countries whose waterways (like the lost tributary of the yellow Nile originating in Chad) have become “lost in the sands of time”.
It seemed to me at the time slightly disconcerting, this movement throughout the performance between dance, documentary and ritual of sorts. As the documentary-style film ends, Faramawy engages in a sequence that seems to summon a pharaonic sensibility — citing ancient beliefs about the afterlife and final judgement. Faramawy puts each of us on trial by cynically and rhetorically asking:
“Did you kill?
Did you steal?
Did you pollute the waters of the Nile?
Is your heart lighter than a feather?”
Rowing across the water, as if being taken to the hereafter, we find ourselves not in heaven, but back underground in…a nightclub? Finding sanctuary in the subterranean strobe lights, Faramawy, still covered in the toxic water waste, spins as a dervish dancer in some sort of ritualistic, ecstatic ascension. Submitting to their very sins, their role in the pollution of the rivers, they find their solace underground with the subterranean slivering rivers.
In under 35 minutes, Faramawy transports us across the tributaries of time, history, and land – embodying the unsteadiness of water’s depths and the secrets that die with it. Investigating water as a litmus test of our morality, the ethics of our governmental systems, the erasure of colonial histories and our everlasting desires trapped beneath the surface, Daughters of the River runs its course through you and all that you know.
Featured Image: Adham Faramawy, Daughters of the River, 2024, performed as part of the Infinite Ecologies Marathon, 11 July 2024, Stone Nest. Photo by Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine.
