The Watcher

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single channel video · 4K · 19 min · color · stereo sound
English & Arabic spoken, English subtitles.

Principal photography for Ola Hassanain's The Watcher, a reflection on the act of watching as a form of responsibility—of bearing witness to both environmental and political catastrophe. Central to the project is the figure of the watcher, drawn from Sudan’s Gezira irrigation scheme: a community caretaker who monitors water levels and signals early signs of floor. Rooted in communities facing environmental precarity, the role becomes a lens for considering how people respond to the slow unfolding of catastrophe—whether natural or engineered.

The film moves between two roles inhabited by the same performer. One watches within an agricultural landscape, observing for signs of ecological crisis—mud, storm surges, rising water—alerting others to the slow violence of uninhabitability. In a temporal fold, this same figure inhabits his “historic future” in Waterloopbos, a former hydraulic testing site in the Netherlands where technologies of water control were developed and later exported to colonial contexts such as the Gezira scheme. The second watcher appears in the urban margins, surveilling the displaced—those now framed as “debris” while also acting as a double informant: warning residents ahead of their forced removal, resisting the machinery of state control. As Ola describes, “they watch for the catastrophe of modernity, which brings a continuous cycle of removal and arrival.”

The Wacther installation view, Kunstinstituut Melly, 2025.
Photos: Kirstien Daem