When Absence Takes Hold
Fatma Fahmy
We don’t always see ourselves as part of nature. Sometimes we treat it as distant, forgetting it is a living being carrying its own history and the stories of those who lived around it.
Lake Qarun, in Egypt’s Fayoum region, was never just a place. It was livelihood, intimacy, and quiet companionship for the people of Ezbet Soliman and nearby villages a doorway to a whole way of life.
But in the last decades, that door has slowly closed. When the High Dam was built, the lake’s connection to the Nile was cut. With rising salinity, untreated sewage, agricultural runoff, and climate change, the water became polluted. Fish vanished, the shoreline receded until it felt like that door had closed completely, leaving everyone suspended between two worlds: between land that lost its water, and souls still searching for life.
It highlights unequal environmental outcomes: when we forget that nature has a soul and treat it only as something to take from, never to care for. The burden of these changes is often carried by women—frequently among the first to experience loss and the last to leave. In silence and resilience, they carry families and memories, becoming the final bridge between a crumbling land and a world still searching for meaning. Through their endurance, they shape the meaning of survival.
"When Absence Takes Hold” is a long-term visual project from Egypt,shaped by the lens of ecofeminism. It explores how the ecological collapse of Lake Qarun has impacted women’s lives revealing the emotional and environmental weight of loss, and inviting reflection on our relationship with nature and memory.
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