Apr 20th 2023

Since 2017, Beirut and Berlin-based artist Marwa Arsanios has been working on a series of remarkable films collectively titled WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY that explore ecology, feminism, collectivity, and resistance through Indigenous and women’s communities in Kurdistan, Colombia, and Lebanon. She presents the project over two evenings, each followed by a conversation about her subjects and innovative approach.

In WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY PART 3: MICRO RESISTANCIAS, Arsanios turns her focus to the seed and its potential as a tool for political agency and resistance. She travels to central Colombia, where she spends time with a group of Indigenous women farmers devoted to safeguarding native seeds and agriculture. As these women buttress their communities against transnational agricultural conglomerates threatening the land, Arsanios draws parallels to the political violence indigenous communities have faced at the hands of paramilitary forces since the 1980s.

Arsanios returns to the Middle East in WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY PART 4: REVERSE SHOT which begins with the entreaty: “imagine a land without ownership.” Tracing her own efforts to transform a piece of privately owned land in Northern Lebanon into a masha’a—a land for the commons—she brings together archival research, legal theory, and oral histories to chart a history and future of the region from the perspective of the land itself.

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