From the peaks above to the palms below

Let me begin with an audio excerpt from a recent project I completed called To the Water Hunters (2025). It explores the overlapping singing tradition of Tarq, a folk poetry singing style bound to daily practices of working the land, farming, herding, harvesting, and living in rhythm with it, which echoes across both Tunis in North Africa and the Aseer region in southwestern Saudi Arabia. This tradition is the heartbeat of the human-earth relationship that is at the centre of my artistic practice, taking in the lineage of someone who was raised in the Sarawat Mountains of Aseer and spent their formative years there.

In 2020, while researching wildfires that scarred the juniper forests in Jabal Al-Mufarrah in Al-Soudah and Jabal Gholama in the city of Tanomah, I was reminded that this was a landscape already marked by an earlier catastrophe. Local memory remains shaped by accounts of the ‘black rain’ that followed the 1991 Gulf War, due to the burning of oil wells, and the juniper dieback is believed to have occurred in its aftermath. Yet even amid this history of sorrow and ecological loss, drone footage of the burned terrain revealed something extraordinary: the forest had grown over an ancient network of stone terraces, long abandoned and concealed beneath the trees.

This discovery brought back a childhood memory. Growing up in the region, I had heard elders refer to these structures not as agricultural terraces, but as sudud (water dams). To classify them as merely farming plots is to overlook their primary ecological function. The soil here is dense with clay and requires time to absorb moisture; the sudud slowed and held the water, allowing the earth to drink. As these ancient practices disappeared, the landscape gradually lost its ability to retain water. Consequently, rainfall moves more quickly and violently across the terrain, contributing to flash floods that destroy the villages, accelerate ecosystem loss, and intensify the conditions that fuel seasonal wildfires.

Yet during a research trip to the Red Sea, I visited a nearby adjacent wadi (a desert riverbed or ravine that remains empty of water until heavy seasonal rains) that carried the smell of life. There I began to understand the profound duality of these flash floods. They are violent, but they are also arterial, carrying water, sediment, and vital nutrients from the mountain peaks down to the sea. Witnessing this cycle deepened the conceptual framework of my Water Hunters research, which explores ancient water management and harvesting, alongside the migratory poetics of water across the Arabian Peninsula. The vibrant ecology of the Red Sea is sustained, in part, by the mineral wealth that rushes down from the highlands through these seasonal waterways.

In AlUla, this history is inscribed into the earth. The ongoing revival of Ain Tadeal, an ancient qanat (irrigation) system located in the Old Town, is bringing to light a carefully engineered infrastructure that has sustained the oasis for generations. Buried and largely forgotten with the arrival of mechanised water, it is only now being uncovered and understood anew. The Nabataeans, flourishing over two millennia ago, likewise mastered this arid landscape through systems of concealed cisterns positioned along their trade routes. Their survival depended not only on finding and storing water, but also on protecting knowledge of where it could be found. Their relationship to hidden water is embedded in the meaning often attributed to their name: the ‘extractors’ or ‘finders’ of water.

Further south, in Khaybar, the ancient forts of Al-Rawan, have supported human habitation for thousands of years through Ain Al-Jammah, a natural spring that continues to flow today. The surrounding aflaj irrigation network operates through an ingenuous system of equitable distribution: heavy stones are positioned to redirect the flow, ensuring every farm receives its share (wajbah). Over centuries of use, the rushing water has worn these stones smooth. They have become enduring records of the system, shaped by the same current as the aflaj itself.

This mastery of geography extends eastward to the Al Hajar Mountains, the Arabian Peninsula’s other great mountain range, near Muscat (Oman). I was particularly captivated by the site of Birkat Al Mouz, an ancient settlement built precisely at the threshold of where mountain meets valley. Its ingenious positioning allows runoff from the peaks to be captured and directed through the village, before flowing into the lower oases through a historic aflaj system. The settlement stands as a quiet testament to the region’s enduring dialogue with water, reminding us that every drop forms part of a thread connecting indigenous knowledge to collective survival.