March 11, 2025: The PhD-in-Practice program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna kindly invites you to the Defense of Marwa Arsanios' dissertation project Matter of Alliances ~ the Metabolic Image of Land Struggle. The Examination Panel is made up of: Janine Jembere (chair), Anette Baldauf and Renate Lorenz (supervisors), and Bojana Kunst (external appraiser, Justus Liebig University Giessen). Marwa Arsanios is not only a great artist and researcher, she has also been a dear tutor@ DAI since 2017 when she embarked, together with Leon Filter and Leire Vergara, on the serial COOP: Curating Positions. We warmly salute Marwa and wish her lots of strenght & briiliance on that remarkable day in March !
"The thesis Matter of Alliances, The Metabolic Image of Land Struggle is structured around three specific relationships to land that shake the state apparatus and its judiciary system that sanctifies private property. These are three cases of communalization of land led by grassroot anti-colonial and ecological feminist movements and organizations. While mapping out the different practices of communalization processes, that depart from seed guarding, a reappropriation through armed struggle and a legal battle, one notices that these three forms of political organizing around land, whether anarchic, party politics or legal intervention, can complement each other to a certain extent.
Each context and geography shape its own resistance strategy, but from Iraqi Kurdistan, to Northern Syria, to the North of Lebanon, the South of Tolima in Colombia there is a similar purpose; that of de-privatization, collectivization of land and ultimately communalization. As an artist I have had a long-term engagement with each of the commune, movement and cooperatives that are mentioned in the thesis; Whether as a member and founder or as a mediator, translator or ally. This implicated position translates in the writing itself. I use historical materialist and new materialist references to engage with the political paradigms of the different movements, I also use political theory and other literature produced by the movements themselves.
Matter and the infrastructure of the soil become a mirror for organizing. How can we learn from the ground and underground in our political organizing? How do we organize in proximity to land and matter? These questions are answered throughout the text which topographical language functions as a voyage across the different geographies of struggle.
The camera becomes a protagonist in the process. It brings us close to the soil and asks questions about the production of form, and a new image of the landscape that is not one of extraction. What kind of non-extractivist film practice can take part in this process? Film and documentary become a tool to connect the different geographies and struggles and allow us to critically think about image production and the filmic apparatus as a historical tool for expansion and extraction.
The films themselves are often born out of a mutual desire to transmit the work and struggles of the communities and their resistance practices. They become a pedagogical tool to learn from the struggle for land. They are also a filmic experiment in the way they rethink collective work, alternative ways of producing films and accordingly produce a new aesthetic.
In the last chapter a more speculative attempt sets the tone for a new economic proposal. And a reflection on the position of the artists implicated in the art economy through this journey.
Please join Marwa for the defense presentation.
Date: Tuesday, March 11, 2025; 3:30pm - 4:30pm
The event will take place at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna,
Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna, room tower 2, DG06.
About Marwa Arsanios
contact: phd-in-practice@akbild.ac.at