To begin the program, artist, filmmaker and researcher Marwa Arsanios (Beirut-Berlin) is invited to give a workshop and a public talk, sharing her line of artistic research.
In the public talk, Marwa Arsanios will talk about the different phases of her long-term project. Who fears ideology?, focusing on the processes and methodologies of collective work. She will review the different strategies of communalization of land that she has worked with and encountered throughout her career, as well as the role and place of cinema in these processes.
Marwa Arsanios reconsiders mid-20th century politics from a contemporary perspective. Her work reflects on structural and infrastructural issues from a perspective of new materialism and historical materialism, together with different feminist movements that fight for their land. Her work introduces us to the analysis of issues of property, law, economy and ecology from their specific territorialities.
Arsanios obtained an MA in Fine Arts from the University of the Arts London (2007) and was a researcher in the Department of Fine Arts at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, the Netherlands (2011-2012). She has been a researcher at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany (2014), and at Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo Arts and Space (2010), and is co-founder of the 98weeks Research Project. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the Akademie der bildenden Kunst in Vienna.
Workshop (for participants of the NOSYMMETRIES working group)
This workshop will draw on a set of literary and filmic materials that reflect on the possibility of a relationship with land other than that of private property. Where do we find the commons today? In what practices of assembly, collective land tenure, etc.? We will discuss fragments of texts and watch some scenes from films that will help us reflect on issues such as communalization, collectivization, non-property, etc. The goal will be to assemble a small toolbox of communalization.