iihya’ is the closing chapter of Sama Alshaibi’s project Silsila (“Link,” photography and video, 2009–2017). Following a forty-year displacement from the artist’s homeland of southern Iraq, her return coincides with an apocalyptic reckoning with the ancient Mesopotamian Marshes, now threatened by decades of water mismanagement, targeted annihilation, and climate change. Once seen moving through the historic deserts and water bodies of North Africa and West Asia throughout Silsila, the protagonist returns to a place long associated with creation, civilization, and Alshaibi’s childhood memory. As the wetlands shaped by the Tigris and Euphrates approach disappearance, the protagonist wills an imaginative intervention that reverses time and order in the marshlands.

A ritual of spatial justice and ecological remembrance, the video extends Alshaibi’s long engagement with the body as a symbolic figure moving through damaged landscapes. In this final chapter, revival is not presented as resolution, but as a poetic intervention into a place where water, memory, and survival remain inseparable.