Nocturnal Returns عودة ليلية

Nocturnal Returns عودة ليلية brings together field recordings, landscape and poetry, drawn from a night walk along the Euphrates during the artist’s first return to Deir ez-Zor, Syria. The work moves through a landscape marked by disappearance, displacement and violence, as well as the liminal presence of voices and the longing between them. The landscape inhabits two registers at once: one shaped by relation and memory, the other by the systematic erasure and militarised violence. A land aggressively harmed, and inhabited by what continues beneath it. The sound emerges from the river landscape: birds, prayers, water generators, tanks, shifting soil, transmission noise and wind moving through abandoned structures. Composed in collaboration with artist Tuce Alba, the work follows maqam Saba as an unfinished scale, refusing resolution. It gathers what remains unresolved between departure and return, disappearance and survival, a breath contaminated and persistent, carrying both elegy and omen. Sound, image and poetry score are stitched together into fugitive fragments and sonic residues, intimate, escaping capture, and carrying the weight of the unsaid, opening a space for being otherwise.