Please join us for an evening devoted to cosmologies of the commons in West Asia and North Africa, and their present resurgence.
Soumeya Ait Ahmed and Nadir Bouhmouch will present a new lecture-performance on two types of common spaces in Morocco, the Assays and the Agadir, and two types of collective practices, the Agraw and Tiwiza. Marwa Arsanios will share her research on the Mashaa, a communal system of land tenure that goes beyond ownership and still exists in some regions of West Asia. The evening will begin with a screening of her film Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 4 Reverse Shot (35 min, 2022), a collaborative investigation of anti-capitalist ideas around property and land ownership in Lebanon. The evening is moderated by Philippe Pirotte.
The evening is hosted at K1, Avenue du Port 1, 1000 Brussels. Drinks will be served from 17:30, with the screening starting at 18:00 and the roundtable at 19:00. The event is free and in English. The cycle about Commons in West Asia and North Africa includes an event and a workshop.
This event is co-produced by de Appel en KANAL-Centre Pompidou.
Tizintizwa ("mountain pass of the bees") is a polydisciplinary art and research collective that provides pretexts for collective creation and cross-pollination. Their practice is based on working together and with others, finding consonance in difference and championing heterogeneity in nature and culture. Their work often involves collaborating with agricultural communities, documenting oral literature and ancestral traditions, observing ecological transformations, facilitating cross-regional dialogue and highlighting the importance of transgenerational transmission and the relationship between land and people. In 2019, Tizintizwa initiated AWAL, a collaborative oral heritage archive project which includes a rural residency and a public programme dedicated to documenting, unpacking and curating "oraliture" in Morocco and beyond.
Marwa Arsanios addresses structural questions using different devices, forms and strategies. From investigating the conflict-driven transformation of architecture to exploring artist-run spaces and temporary conventions between feminist communes and cooperatives, her practice aims to make space within − and without − existing art structures to experiment with different kinds of politics. She frequently uses the medium (and space) of film to connect struggles as if they were images. In recent years, Arsanios has adopted a new materialist perspective on these issues, focusing on feminist movements and historic land struggles. In this approach, she explores questions of property, law, economy and ecology while looking at specific plots of lands and the people who work on them. Her multidisciplinary research and collaborative methods have been deployed in numerous projects.
Philippe Pirotte, co-artistic director of the Busan Biennale 2024, is a professor of Art History and former rector at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. He is also an adjunct senior curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1999, Pirotte co-founded the contemporary art center Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp. From 2005 to 2011 he was director of Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland and from 2004-2013 a senior advisor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Recently, he curated a survey exhibition of performance artist Melati Suryodarmo at the Bonnefanten Museum Maastricht (2022) and the group show Arus Balik: From below the wind to above the wind and back again at the Center for Contemporary Art in Singapore (2019). Pirotte was a member of the curatorial team for the 2017 Jakarta Biennale and served as artistic director of La Biennale de Montréal in Canada in 2016. In addition to curating, he has also edited several books and authored numerous essays and contributions to catalogues on modern and contemporary art. Most recently, he edited an anthology of writings by the artist Hassan Khan.
