In this reimagined lecture performance for Tate Modern’s Starr Cinema, Adham Faramawy combines film, sound, and spoken word to tell the stories of the romances and toxicities of rivers and waterways. Drawing from Alexander Pope’s poem ‘Windsor-Forest,’ the lecture performance flows between poetic and narrative forms to explore these aqueous ecosystems. From the Thames at the museum’s doorstep, to the Nile River in Egypt, Faramawy explores the fragile boundary between purity and impurity, tracing the imperial histories of major waterways that sustain life for millions. Weaving history, mythology, fiction, and queer desire to the reveal the colonial undercurrents of rivers, Faramawy identifies them as sites of extraction and ecological collapse.
The lecture and performance are part of the first day of Tate Modern's 'Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational's Annual Symposium' entitled 'Waterways: Arteries, Rhythms and Kindship'.
