The Beirut-based artist and filmmaker’s intimate reflection on land ownership asks how imagination might be used as a tool for political change
There is an Arabic term for the rural commons, Al Masha, which refers to communal land that is equally distributed among those who use it. The moment each member stops using the land, they lose their stake in it. Beirut-based artist, filmmaker and researcher Marwa Arsanios takes the concept of Al Masha as the starting point for the latest in her film series Who Is Afraid of Ideology (2017–ongoing). The film documents the artist and a group of collaborators as they attempt to change the legal status of a quarry in the mountains of northern Lebanon into common land. Earlier iterations of the series saw Arsnios explore histories of popular resistance in Syria and Colombia, while in Part 4: Reverse Shot, she turns her attention toward the country she calls home.
In one scene, Arsanios’s camera documents the work of a local agricultural collective during an olive harvest. ‘Private property’, we hear one narrator say, ‘is a condition of our times. I think there is a certain gap between the egalitarian imagination of abolishing private property and our world’. So begins a debate between multiple unseen voices, whose conflicting opinions challenge each other to rethink the commons in a manner that is utopian while being grounded in both a capitalist history and Lebanon’s present, postcolonial reality. ‘Let’s not fetishise the land,’ one speaker implores. ‘It’s not about fetishisation. It is about imagination,’ another retorts.
Arsanios’s film is concerned with the power of imagination as a tool for real political change. It is an impulse reflected in her visual language, which veers from a straight documentation of the dry and sandy landscape to surreal animations of the soil moving, rocks quivering, moss growing and mushrooms swelling – as if to emphasise the impossibility of ever truly possessing the natural world or enforcing a system of control upon it. While a fleeting shot of a lone camera, mounted on a tripod and rotating amid a natural landscape otherwise devoid of human life, hints at the artist’s own consideration of the wider impact of her role and relationship to the land. By filming this place, is she taking an alternative form of ownership over the land through its representation onscreen?
Arsanios likens a system of inheritance to the geological sedimentation process, drawing a link between the accumulation of wealth and the hardening of sand over millions of years, while resistance is compared to the ruptures enacted by the movement of tectonic plates. To begin the process of communisation, the artist intones in voiceover, is ‘like stepping on thousands of ghosts’. Arsanios’s film summons these ghosts – past inhabitants, farmers, shepherds or seeds – and invokes their intimacy with the land. These ghosts ‘question the movement of history,’ she reflects. ‘They ask for a reverse shot. They have opened new rifts in the ground.’
Screening dates:
Art Lovers Movie Club: Marwa Arsanios, Who Is Afraid Of Ideology? Part 4: Reverse Shot, 2022, 35 mins, Germany and Lebanon
23 May–13 June 2025
© Courtesy the artist and Mor Charpentier gallery
Marwa Arsanios is an artist, filmmaker and researcher whose work takes the form of installation, performance and moving-image. She reconsiders the political development of the second half of the twentieth century from a contemporary perspective, focusing on gender relations, collectivism, urbanism and industrialisation. She is the co-founder of the 98weeks Research Project, a non-profit, artist-run space in Beirut.
Solo exhibitions of her work have been staged at Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany (2023); Mosaïc Rooms, London (2022); Beirut Art Center (2017); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016). Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions including: Documenta 15, Kassel (2022); 11th Berlin Biennale (2020); The Renaissance, Chicago (2020); 2nd Lahore Biennale (2020); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2019); 1st Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019); SF Moma, San Francisco (2019). She received the Georges de Beauregard International Prize at FID Marseille (2019), the Special Prize of the Pinchuk Future Generation Art Prize (2012), and was nominated for the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize (2017) and the Han Nefkens Foundation Award (2014).
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