Who Is Afraid of Ideology? (2017–ongoing) is the query posed by artist Marwa Arsanios’s eponymous cycle of 5 movies, offered collectively for the primary time at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, within the exhibition The Land Shall Not Be Owned. All the works inform tales of feminist politics and struggles for the reappropriation of land, each as a matter of possession and because the immaterial transmission of data. The title seems like a deliberate provocation to the frequent perception—rising within the Nineteen Nineties after the collapse of the Soviet bloc—that each one types of ideology belong to the previous, and, extra particularly, to the illusory gender equality advocated by white feminism. As an alternative, Arsanios invitations us to rehabilitate visions that up to date historical past has deemed outdated, or nonetheless struggles to think about as viable.
This mission by Arsanios, a Berlin-based, Lebanese researcher and filmmaker, is pushed by questions corresponding to: The way to narrate a given actuality with out imposing one’s personal imaginative and prescient on it? The way to be supportive whereas sustaining the proper distance, with out overexposing or underexposing the actions and communities with which new types of alliance are being shaped? How can an artist promote anti-capitalist imagery whereas inhabiting the capitalist dynamics of artwork’s economic system and establishments? And: The way to movie a land with out reproducing a possessive imaginary, and with out fetishizing its panorama?
All of the chapters of Who Is Afraid of Ideology? undertake a located, ecofeminist perspective that permits Arsanios to relate totally different political practices of girls’s self-governance and resistance in Iraqi Kurdistan, northeastern Syria, Colombia, and/or Lebanon. The artist resolutely strikes towards documentary conventions, which might be exoticizing, extractive, and resulting in the invisibilization of collective sources of data development and their usurpation by tutorial hierarchies and apparatuses of epistemic energy. The result’s a collective portrait of girls’s actions by which the writer figures as listener and mediator, caught within the act of studying categorical what the actions should convey. One of many scenes that finest captures this positioning is the opening of Half 1 (2017), filmed within the mountains of Qandil in Kurdistan: Arsanios seems on the heart of the body, embedded within the panorama, whereas strolling towards the digital camera and talking out of sync with the audio observe as if to articulate a type of distance, properly conscious of the hole that separates her from the truth she is presenting, but additionally keen to affix these communities and their fights.
Seen collectively, the 5 movies illuminate the evolution of Arsanios’s cinematic ecology, the place the recursive articulation of distance leads to more and more dreamlike imagery. The exhibition—curated by Agustin Pérez Rubio and Bernardo Follini—proceeds backward. It begins with the final chapter of the cycle, Half 5: Proper of Passage (2025), a movie about animal rights of passage by means of properties and about animals as property, premiering right here for the event. The narrative opens within the first particular person; we hear a voice that—from the opposite movies—we have now causes to imagine belongs to Arsanios, though the narrator by no means exhibits herself. She wears a protracted brown coat and a mouse-headed silicone masks. It’s on this oneiric, fictional dimension that human and animal beings can meet. The narrator remembers when, at a time of nice hazard and concern, her goals started to be populated by mice, as if solely these little rodents might assist her, or as if she might flip herself right into a mouse. This interspecies determine guides us first by means of Hegelian, after which Marxist thought, looking for the preliminary distinction between human and animal, of the definition of animal labor, and consequently of all of the processes of dehumanization, annihilation, and vampirization generated by capitalism. The movie oscillates between a number of registers: The linguistic-etymological and the authorized take us by means of the historical past of land privatization; the topographical and geological clarify colonization; the human and more-than-human discuss embodied violence.
Shot in northeastern Syria within the women-only village of Jinwar, the aforementioned Half 1, together with Half 2 (2019), are put in within the second room. Arsanios’s observe of distance is clear: the filmic gadgets all the time stay evident to be able to make cinema itself a automobile for dialogue. Every movie due to this fact turns into an area by which a attainable collectivity, even a brief one, can take form, with the aim of bridging the struggles of these combating for a similar aim, albeit in several geographies. In Half 4: Reverse Shot (2022), set in a non-public quarry in northern Lebanon, Arsanios makes an attempt to reimagine this land as free of the regime of possession and topic solely to the proper of use. Right here the narrative turns into collective, entrusted to 3 folks in dialogue. They accompany viewers by means of the historic reconstruction of the Lebanese authorized system, a radical redefinition of the idea of possession, and the method of reworking this land right into a waqf, a standard good. This course of brings to life the ghostly traces of each previous natural life kind, “whether or not animals, micro organism, fungi, people, non-sedentary, sedentary, and extra. The ghosts that emerge are the inhabitants and passersby. They’re farmers, shepherds, canines, seeds, bandits, fig bushes, and others. They query the motion of historical past, they demand a counter-field.” Some components of the movies are expanded within the exhibition area within the type of botanical drawings, textile sculptures, embroideries depicting resilient species, and banners bearing precepts that regulate the proper to publicly use a waqf.
Closing the exhibition is Half 3: Micro Resistencias (2020), filmed in Tolima, Colombia: a narrative of agricultural resistance, land claims and reclamations, seed dissemination, and the reorganization of Indigenous communities. The digital camera follows a bunch of Pijao farmers by means of lush vegetation as Arsanios interviews them. Photos alternate between portraits and landscapes. The narrative right here is entrusted to those ladies engaged within the safety of their native seeds, in order that dissemination, as an alternative of preservation and accumulation, turns into a type of resistance towards the exploitation of pure sources.
Arsanios bears the present of a place that feels embodied and haunted traditionally, suggesting {that a} reconciliation with ghosts is just attainable when undertaken collectively. Her deconstruction of the codes of illustration of lands and territories and the communities who inhabit—or inhabited—them asks us to rethink our relationship not solely with documentary cinema, however extra typically with our being on this planet.
at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin
till June 1, 2025
Marwa Arsanios (b. 1978, Beirut) tackles structural questions utilizing totally different gadgets, types, and methods. From the transformation and adaptableness of architectural areas throughout occasions of battle to artist-run areas to non permanent conventions between feminist communes and cooperatives, Arsanios’s observe tends to create space inside and parallel to present artwork constructions, permitting for experimentation with totally different sorts of politics. For the artist, movie—in the way in which that photos refer to at least one one other—turns into one other kind and area for connecting struggles. Over the previous 4 years, Arsanios has been invested in these questions from a brand new and historic materialist perspective, investigating totally different feminist actions which can be struggling for his or her land. Central to her analysis are questions of property, regulation, economic system, and ecology tied to particular plots of land—which, together with the individuals who work them, change into the primary protagonists within the work. Arsanios’s observe encompasses many disciplines and is deployed in quite a few collective methodologies and collaborative initiatives. Solo exhibitions have taken place at BAK, Utrecht (2024); Kunsthalle Bratislava (2023); Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg (2023); Mosaic Rooms, London (2022); Up to date Arts Middle, Cincinnati (2021); Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2018); Beirut Artwork Middle (2017); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2016); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2015); and Artwork in Common, New York (2015).
Mariacarla Molè is an artwork author primarily based in Turin, Italy.
