Usufructuaries of earth

The exhibition foregrounds the artist’s collaborative approach to bringing together ecological, feminist, and decolonial knowledges and practices that put forward ideologies of shared usership.

Usufructuaries of earth is the first comprehensive exhibition of Marwa Arsanios’s work in the Netherlands. The exhibition foregrounds the artist’s collaborative approach to bringing together ecological, feminist, and decolonial knowledges and practices that put forward ideologies of usufruct, unhinging property-relations from the idiom of individuated possession and toward forms of common userships between humans and other-than-humans. The exhibition includes an earlier body of work Falling is not collapsing, falling is extending (2016) and four films from the ongoing series entitled Who is Afraid of Ideology?, which began in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2017. In dialogue with the film installations are works of various media—tapestries, prints, drawings, archival material, and landfill models—that foreground the artist’s ongoing inquiry into property and, in turn, the subversion of property regimes through shared practices of use. Ideology here is not eluded but rather researched by the artist as a form of political becoming that generates alternative forms of relating to earth as a means of practicing micro resistance against the transactional relations within everyday life. These alternate forms offer an escape from the hegemonic ideology of property ownership itself.