I returned to Zurich twenty years after first coming here to accompany my mother, confined for that trip to a hospital bed and a wheelchair, her movements following routes she had no part in choosing. She died soon after we brought her home. I had applied to this residency to study river-bathing culture; watching her body moved by systems she had no say in, I began to see rivers the same way, bodies of water directed, dammed, and disciplined by systems they have no part in choosing.
In my open studio at Rote Fabrik, at the culmination of a three-month Pro Helvetia Cairo residency, this return unfolded across video installation, performance, sound, and writing published as the zine To Be Carried, overlapping family fragments with river histories and Zurich's bathing sites, scored by the spiritual "Wade in the Water" and Khalifeh's setting of Darwish: who gets to swim, and who is excluded by water?
I kept returning to "troubled waters": the Jordan invoked in African American spirituals born under slavery and later carried through traditions of Black liberation, the Nile shaped by colonial extraction and disease, the Jordan again today, a river marked by militarized borders and dispossession, where grief itself can be policed under occupation. Promises of a Storm takes its name from Darwish's poem, where the storm carries the promise of revolt.
The work is anchored in mourning, personal and infrastructural: my mother's body, directed by wheelchair, hospital bed, and walker, and the river's body, directed by dams, canals, and colonial policy, both cared for and controlled by the systems that move them. To be carried means both at once, held and captive, a tension carried through the gesture of "Dry Swimming," strokes performed without water, suspended between absence and drought. In the zine, nineteenth-century Nile irrigation and corvée labor turned bilharzia into a mass disease among Egypt's working class, a disease its Swiss-German "discoverer" blamed on the bodies of the poor rather than the policy that infected them. It also killed Abd al-Halim Hafez, Egypt's most beloved singer, infected swimming in a river canal as a child.
The zine itself is wrapped in recycled copies of Fabrikzeitung, Rote Fabrik's long-running artist newspaper, which I contributed to years ago.
How does it end a river? It has endless endings.