{"id":46388,"date":"2025-05-27T12:34:39","date_gmt":"2025-05-27T10:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/?post_type=mostre&p=46388"},"modified":"2026-01-26T18:02:25","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T16:02:25","slug":"marwa-arsanios-the-land-shall-not-be-owned","status":"publish","type":"mostre","link":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/mostre-category\/marwa-arsanios-the-land-shall-not-be-owned\/","title":{"rendered":"Marwa Arsanios. The Land Shall Not Be Owned"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents The Land Shall Not Be Owned<\/em>, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios (b. 1978).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the core of the exhibition is Who is Afraid of Ideology?<\/em> (2017\u2013ongoing), Arsanios\u2019 long-term project and film series, which investigates land re-appropriation, exploitation, and local reclamation struggles across several geographies in the Middle East and South America. The exhibition marks the international premiere of the fifth and latest chapter\u2014co-produced by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo\u2014presented alongside the previous four films. The show unfolds in reverse chronological order, bringing the five video installations into dialogue with drawings, textile sculptures, embroideries, and banners, each emerging from and expanding upon the imaginary of the films.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who is Afraid of Ideology?<\/em> is an in-depth and ongoing investigation into the politics of land distribution and extraction, focusing on local struggles for land reclamation in Kurdistan, Iraq, northeastern Syria, Colombia, and Lebanon. Across the five films, Arsanios highlights forms of self-organization and self-defense within female communities, exploring the ways in which they challenge patriarchal structures\u2014whether family, the state, or multinational corporations. The result is a collective portrait and a context-specific yet transnational mapping, where ecological, feminist, indigenous, and decolonial perspectives converge to shape new practices of political autonomy. Beyond the films, the project takes the form of conventions, reading groups, publications, and more, the latest of which was \u201cUsufructuaries of Earth,\u201d a convention co-organized with curator Wietske Maas at BAK (basis voor actuele kunst)  in Utrecht.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through Who is Afraid of Ideology?<\/em>, Arsanios reconsiders the form and function of film itself. The medium becomes a tool for disseminating knowledge and building an international network of organizations and communities engaged in struggles for social and political change. At the same time, the artist develops technical and narrative strategies to deconstruct the documentary format\u2014historically ethnographic, extractive, and partial\u2014by breaking the conventions of interviews, disconnecting sound from image, and allowing the instructions and dialogues between filmmaker and subjects to be audible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The series begins with documenting the daily experiences of the Kurdish autonomous women\u2019s movement in the mountainous region of Kurdistan, Iraq (Part 1<\/em>, 2017), and the ecological women\u2019s village of Jinwar in northeastern Syria (Part 2<\/em>, 2019); then follows the seed guarding strategies of Pijao indigenous women farmers in Tolima, Colombia (Part 3: Micro Resistencias<\/em>, 2020); and examines the efforts of an agricultural community in northern Lebanon to prioritize the right to use, or usership<\/em>, over the right to own land (Part 4: Reverse Shot<\/em>, 2022).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest chapter of Who is Afraid of Ideology?<\/em>, Part 5: Right of Passage <\/em>(2025), departs from the legal right of animals to pass across private property, delving into the history of animal movement and animal labor starting from a pre-capitalist moment in Mount Lebanon. The video examines animal settlement and industrial appropriation as the beginning of colonization and the capitalist mode of production, which accompanied the transformation of the region hand in hand. The connection between land appropriation, privatization, and the semi-industrial settlement of animals expands into a more fictional dimension, linking animal passage to the world of dreams and the unconscious. In this dreamlike space, the political animal and the animal seem to meet. Reflecting upon the forms of movement and settlement throughout the film, the video weaves together frame-by-frame 2D animation, staged fiction, and documentary. Arsanios attempts to reimagine the medium of film through a topographical and geological lens, positioning the camera as an animal in passage. The animation is created in collaboration with Vinita Gatne. The series will continue to develop in dialogue with displaced, landless female farmers to explore another dimension of passage, law, land, and movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exhibition will travel to Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, Artium Museoa, in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country, opening in November of 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents The Land Shall Not Be Owned, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios (b. 1978). At the core of the exhibition […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":46371,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"Marwa Arsanios. The Land Shall Not Be Owned","_seopress_titles_desc":"Curated by Agustin P\u00e9rez Rubio and Bernardo Follini | Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo","_seopress_robots_index":"","show_footer_widget":true,"show_related_exhibition":true,"related_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"mostre":[],"m_author":[423,305],"m_venue":[439],"class_list":["post-46388","mostre","type-mostre","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","m_author-agustin-perez-rubio","m_author-bernardo-follini","m_venue-fondazione-sandretto-re-rebaudengo-torino"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mostre\/46388"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mostre"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/mostre"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mostre\/46388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48826,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mostre\/46388\/revisions\/48826"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"mostre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mostre?post=46388"},{"taxonomy":"m_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/m_author?post=46388"},{"taxonomy":"m_venue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/m_venue?post=46388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}