When The River Came treats the river as a carrier of stories, focusing on flooding as a socio-natural event where multiple realities coexist. It challenges the conventional framing of flood events as disaster imagery, considering instead how water overflow can generate new forms of solidarity, care, vulnerability, and fear. As seen in Deluge (2018) by Gideon Mendel and Before Freedom (2022) by Adam Rouhana, viewed side by side, these photographic works reveal how floods can evoke different human reactions and perceptions.

Centred on the Great Flood of 1997 in Poland, the project draws on personal accounts, public records, and collective memory. Poland is regularly affected by flooding, yet historical knowledge of such events is uneven, often fragmented and dependent on what was documented, where, and by whom. In response, When The River Came shifts attention toward lived experience and social relations that emerge in moments of crisis, approaching water as a witness not only to damage and loss but also to forms of connection.

Using alternative photographic processes, the work produces prints that function as sites of memory. Images sourced from the Polska Pod Wodą archive are printed onto woven polypropylene sandbags using a modified Van Dyke Brown technique mixed with dried silt collected from the Vistula River. By embedding river sediment into the emulsion, the project positions the river as a component of the image, materially entangled with its representation.

Sandbags operate here as both surface and symbol. Associated with emergency response and improvised defence, they register the tension between protection and infrastructural failure, while also recalling their use in safeguarding monuments during wartime. In When The River Came, they act not simply as supports for images but as witnesses within them, foregrounding how water events reshape social relations and how memory depends on what is documented, preserved, and circulated.

The resulting image appears in muddy tones, as river sediment, Van Dyke Brown and the hydrophobic, woven surface of the sandbag disrupt the photograph, breaking it into a grid-like, pixelated pattern that evokes how floods persist in memory—fragmented, diffused, and materially altered over time.