Walking the Euphrates is a shared dialogue between artist-researchers Joud Toamah and Ameneh Solati, exploring the Euphrates river in Syria and the marshes in Iraq as living, ecological, and geopolitical bodies of resistance. Through this collective ‘walk’ along the river, they trace entangled aquatic geographies, histories of struggle and care, and shared contexts of resistance, centering the waters as companions and ancestral presences. This will take the form of hybrid ways to share research through artist talks, sound and video.

This session is part of the research project River Witness, by Joud Toamah.

Biographies:

Joud Toamah is a multidisciplinary graphic designer and artist-researcher from Syria, currently based in Belgium. Working across multiple media, publishing, writing, video, sound, and image-making, her practice engages displacement and re-memberance within personal and collective memory. Currently She is undergoing an artistic research that centers water cultures, and water as a site of witness and resistance amid militarization and infrastructural violence during and in post-dictatorship Syria along the watery places she loves by the Euphrates. She is currently coordinating the Advanced Master of Art and Design Research (AdMa), and co-preparing a course on ‘Islamic Ways of Knowing and Aesthetic Practices’ at Sint Lucas Antwerp.

Ameneh Solati is a research-based artist and architect. Her practice investigates the spatial manifestations of power and resistance within marginalized spaces. She leads a design studio at the Design Academy Eindhoven and serves as an editor-at-large at Failed Architecture. Her writing includes Wetlands of Resistance (e-flux Architecture, 2023), and her work has been exhibited at Stroom in The Hague (2025), Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (2024) and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021). Solati holds a master’s degree in architecture from the Royal College of Art in London.