“Marwa Arsanios: The Land Shall Not Be Owned” at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin

Who Is Afraid of Ideology? (2017–ongoing) is the question posed by artist Marwa Arsanios’s eponymous cycle of five films, presented together for the first time at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, in the exhibition The Land Shall Not Be Owned. All of the works tell stories of feminist politics and struggles for the reappropriation of land, both as a matter of ownership and as the immaterial transmission of knowledge. The title sounds like a deliberate provocation to the common belief—emerging in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet bloc—that all forms of ideology belong to the past, and, more specifically, to the illusory gender equality advocated by white feminism. Instead, Arsanios invites us to rehabilitate visions that contemporary history has deemed outdated, or still struggles to imagine as viable.

This project by Arsanios, a Berlin-based, Lebanese researcher and filmmaker, is driven by questions such as: How to narrate a given reality without imposing one’s own vision on it? How to be supportive while maintaining the right distance, without overexposing or underexposing the movements and communities with which new forms of alliance are being formed? How can an artist promote anti-capitalist imagery while inhabiting the capitalist dynamics of art’s economy and institutions? And: How to film a land without reproducing a possessive imaginary, and without fetishizing its landscape?

All the chapters of Who Is Afraid of Ideology? adopt a situated, ecofeminist perspective that allows Arsanios to narrate different political practices of women’s self-governance and resistance in Iraqi Kurdistan, northeastern Syria, Colombia, and/or Lebanon. The artist resolutely moves against documentary conventions, which can be exoticizing, extractive, and leading to the invisibilization of collective sources of knowledge construction and their usurpation by academic hierarchies and apparatuses of epistemic power. The result is a collective portrait of women’s movements in which the author figures as listener and mediator, caught in the act of learning how to express what the movements have to convey. One of the scenes that best captures this positioning is the opening of Part 1 (2017), filmed in the mountains of Qandil in Kurdistan: Arsanios appears at the center of the frame, embedded in the landscape, while walking toward the camera and speaking out of sync with the audio track as if to articulate a form of distance, well aware of the gap that separates her from the reality she is presenting, but also eager to join these communities and their fights.

Seen together, the five films illuminate the evolution of Arsanios’s cinematic ecology, where the recursive articulation of distance results in increasingly dreamlike imagery. The exhibition—curated by Agustin Pérez Rubio and Bernardo Follini—proceeds backward. It begins with the last chapter of the cycle, Part 5: Right of Passage (2025), a film about animal rights of passage through properties and about animals as property, premiering here for the occasion. The narrative opens in the first person; we hear a voice that—from the other films—we have reasons to believe belongs to Arsanios, although the narrator never shows herself. She wears a long brown coat and a mouse-headed silicone mask. It is in this oneiric, fictional dimension that human and animal beings can meet. The narrator recalls when, at a time of great danger and fear, her dreams began to be populated by mice, as if only those little rodents could help her, or as if she could turn herself into a mouse. This interspecies figure guides us first through Hegelian, and then Marxist thought, in search of the initial distinction between human and animal, of the definition of animal labor, and consequently of all the processes of dehumanization, annihilation, and vampirization generated by capitalism. The film oscillates between several registers: The linguistic-etymological and the legal take us through the history of land privatization; the topographical and geological explain colonization; the human and more-than-human speak about embodied violence.

Shot in northeastern Syria in the women-only village of Jinwar, the aforementioned Part 1, along with Part 2 (2019), are installed in the second room. Arsanios’s practice of distance is transparent: the filmic devices always remain evident in order to make cinema itself a vehicle for discussion. Each film therefore becomes a space in which a possible collectivity, even a temporary one, can take shape, with the goal of bridging the struggles of those fighting for the same goal, albeit in different geographies. In Part 4: Reverse Shot (2022), set in a private quarry in northern Lebanon, Arsanios attempts to reimagine this land as freed from the regime of ownership and subject only to the right of use. Here the narrative becomes collective, entrusted to three people in dialogue. They accompany viewers through the historical reconstruction of the Lebanese legal system, a radical redefinition of the concept of ownership, and the process of transforming this land into a waqf, a common good. This process brings to life the ghostly traces of every past organic life form, “whether animals, bacteria, fungi, humans, non-sedentary, sedentary, and more. The ghosts that emerge are the inhabitants and passersby. They are farmers, shepherds, dogs, seeds, bandits, fig trees, and others. They question the movement of history, they demand a counter-field.” Some elements of the films are expanded in the exhibition space in the form of botanical drawings, textile sculptures, embroideries depicting resilient species, and banners bearing precepts that regulate the right to publicly use a waqf.

Closing the exhibition is Part 3: Micro Resistencias (2020), filmed in Tolima, Colombia: a story of agricultural resistance, land claims and reclamations, seed dissemination, and the reorganization of Indigenous communities. The camera follows a group of Pijao farmers through lush vegetation as Arsanios interviews them. Images alternate between portraits and landscapes. The narrative here is entrusted to these women engaged in the protection of their native seeds, so that dissemination, instead of preservation and accumulation, becomes a form of resistance against the exploitation of natural resources.

Arsanios bears the gift of a position that feels embodied and haunted historically, suggesting that a reconciliation with ghosts is only possible when undertaken collectively. Her deconstruction of the codes of representation of lands and territories and the communities who inhabit—or inhabited—them asks us to reconsider our relationship not only with documentary cinema, but more generally with our being in the world.

at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin
until June 1, 2025

Marwa Arsanios (b. 1978, Beirut) tackles structural questions using different devices, forms, and strategies. From the transformation and adaptability of architectural spaces during times of conflict to artist-run spaces to temporary conventions between feminist communes and cooperatives, Arsanios’s practice tends to make space within and parallel to existing art structures, allowing for experimentation with different kinds of politics. For the artist, film—in the way that images refer to one another—becomes another form and space for connecting struggles. Over the past four years, Arsanios has been invested in these questions from a new and historical materialist perspective, investigating different feminist movements that are struggling for their land. Central to her research are questions of property, law, economy, and ecology tied to specific plots of land—which, along with the people who work them, become the main protagonists in the work. Arsanios’s practice encompasses many disciplines and is deployed in numerous collective methodologies and collaborative projects. Solo exhibitions have taken place at BAK, Utrecht (2024); Kunsthalle Bratislava (2023); Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg (2023); Mosaic Rooms, London (2022); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021); Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2018); Beirut Art Center (2017); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2016); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2015); and Art in General, New York (2015).

Mariacarla Molè is an art writer based in Turin, Italy.