Liberatory practices — as discussed between research-based artist Marwa Arsanios and Shehrazade Mahassini, architect and researcher — involve staying with the trouble, embracing coexistent yet contrary ideologies. From grandstanding national projects to autonomous resistance movements, this conversation covers competing claims to land and reparations, while discussing a role for the expanded imaginary.

This conversation is part of KoozArch's issue "Terra Infirma."

SHUMI BOSE / KOOZ Marwa, you’re speaking to us from Berlin now, but you also teach at the Dutch Art Institute. How have you guided your students through this intense time?

MARWA ARSANIOS Students have been quite amazing. Apart from the fact that they already have very engaged practices — coming from different political backgrounds — in the past year, they have been extremely committed to learning about Palestine, the history of the resistance, the history of the struggle, the history of the land and anti-colonial resistance more generally. We also co-organised, along with other teachers at the Dutch Art Institute, monthly teach-ins on Palestine. So on that front, it has been quite amazing to be with our students over the past year. Especially as many institutions, especially here in Germany and Austria, have repressed any form of solidarity with Palestine and have directly silenced, cancelled, fired students and staff.

KOOZ I definitely relate to feeling hopeful with my students. To what extent have you been able to pursue your own questions within academia? Do you find you have to intellectualise your own narratives?

SHEHRAZADE MAHASSINI I am currently not teaching. I miss the exchange with students and process-oriented pedagogies but not the current institutional climate. Challenging educational institutions, especially in architecture, is not difficult; our presence, the presence of People of Colour in the institutional corporate apparatus, is already burdensome for many European white-dominated architecture faculties, but it is part of the DEI policies in place to make these institutions look welcoming, safe and open. The moment we, the same people invited into teaching positions, start to disrupt the existing narratives and bring the erased and forgotten knowledge we obviously embody, we get into trouble. It is exactly what is happening now – the Palestinian Cause unveiled the hypocrisy and double standards of every institution and its "decolonization" curriculum.

I quickly understood that the power of academia — beyond titles and intellectual productivity — is very embedded in the concept of rematriation within teaching. We don't think enough about rematriation within the context of the educational system. When non-white communities populate schools, it is not only the presence of their bodies in white spaces, but it is the embodied ancestral knowledge articulated in their teachings and studies which is permanently reshaping these same spaces. Believing that academia consists of a blunt proposal of white bourgeois knowledge based on colonial extractive knowledge production is naive and dangerous.

There is something we need to reactivate — each of us individually —and bring together with our ancestral knowledge and heritage, which we all embody. That's why I started researching the desert. There is plenty of colonial and orientalist storytelling. However, the nature of water and sand doesn't like artificial arbitrary boundaries; they flow, and we try to manipulate them, but they still pursue their destinations. I started to bring this thinking into my teaching, and many people didn't like it because it's anti-colonial, feminist, and abolitionist. When you bring these narratives with you, you're dismantling the one already in place. Academia is the place par excellence to see how deeply rooted these narratives are in these violent colonial practices. I would love to teach again, but only in a context which takes decolonial curriculum seriously. It's frustrating and affects our physical and mental health. It's alienating and difficult; on the other hand, we need each other to do this work within the institutional framework, as it's urgent – even if I'm permanently struggling with the very existence of education institutions as guardians of knowledge.

KOOZ The burden of having to represent a place or a people — or the impact of larger political machinations — is a heavy one. Marwa, this connection with land, in the way that you have been working, involves dismantling certain narratives to amplify others. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MA I think I have a strong attachment to Beirut where I grew up. I was a child in the 80s, and an adolescent in the 90s and the early 2000s — which is when one begins shaping oneself, and building a sort of an engagement with a place, and forming a political consciousness. One tries to find tools, methods, ways of connecting to the world. My world was that city back then which really shaped me and my understanding of the world. It's a world that has changed a lot. So Beirut went from being a destroyed, crumbling place, into an era of reconstruction and neoliberalism. It became a city that wanted to hide its rubble, and destruction under some polished shiny refurbished surface; it seemed like the consequence of the postwar moment and the desire to join the neoliberal global market.

I think that a lot of my questions — my torments and troubles — come from that moment when the war had “ended” with the Taif agreement. This passage or transition had started — and I remember it like a happy moment for the adolescent that I was. Because at this age you do want the city to look as if it's flourishing, vibrant, at the beginning of your adult life, right? But I think that a lot of the political questions and of course, the artistic and cultural questions come from this critique, as a leitmotif — interrogating how you would actually hide the traces of so much violence. How do you just ‘sweep it under the carpet’ and continue as if nothing happened?

KOOZ What you’re describing sounds like a kind of dissociation, or dissonance.

MAExactly. It's like hiding a wound, because you have to portray a certain normality and work within an economy that imposes a normality, even if it is fueled by necropolitics. What it wants to sell you is positivity, a kind of a polished surface; if you want to join that world, that's the price to pay. A lot of my questions come from a critique of that moment of the reconstruction of the city. Slowly, the question of land and colonial pasts — also of resistance — started to emerge in the work. This is what led me to the particular question of property, actually. Land, property, the relationship to land through usership or social value instead of financial one.

SM You spoke about this moment of reconstruction — reconstructing Beirut, Damascus, Rabat, Algiers and many other post-independence or post-war places. It resonates because there is a traumatic act in reconstructing, which initially sounds positive. We want to bring life back to these ruins, to the lives before the war or the natural catastrophe – before the tragedy. But there is no reckoning with the trauma itself. There is no work to fully understand trauma, where it comes from, the accumulation of tragedies and past injustices and how, at some point, we eventually quickly and undoubtedly choose reconstruction – before even the collective rehearsal of the past, before trying to understand and build something together.

History tends to narrate the perspective of the victorious — those who reconstruct on the ashes of the powerless. They don't speak much about the resistance of the oppressed, the working class or the peasants, who were unwilling to reconstruct their city as decided upon them. Personally, the use of the word reconstruction after terrible events is violent. Yes, thinking and materialising how we want to live is a necessity. Still, unfortunately, it's often the imperial capitalist act that is played repeatedly: it's a violent, colonial way of constructing the "new". We need a collaborative, collective foundation to co-create, and the educational system has to not only make space for these processes to be taught but also divest from the oppressing system funding wars and climate collapse. In architecture schools, we must teach that because reconstruction can be destructive, we must centre the global majority, the planet, and all entangled dimensions in a project. It will be incredibly difficult to unlearn, but it's the existential prerequisite for future generations.

KOOZ Let’s talk about this through some of your works, beginning perhaps with the work you’ve been doing around Libya — or in Marwa’s case, the ongoing series Who's Afraid of Ideology?

SM Sure. I grew up in Morocco; I heard a lot about Syria, but Syria was always part of my mom — I never had this deep connection until my grandpa passed away, about fifteen years ago. I started to look at the idea of Syria more metaphysically and geographically. Yes, until then, it was part of an intangible imaginary. That was the moment I understood that these boundaries or lines have been drawn not only with violence but with stupidity; the nation-state is a farce.

Between Morocco and Syria, there is a huge desert: the Sahara. When you look at it from a geographic and geological point of view, the Sahara seems so dry, but it's one of the wettest regions of the world; there are incredible aquifer systems beneath the sand. As an architect, I have been looking at large-scale infrastructures in Libya. The flooding in Derna last year in September presented a moment to consider the profound question: what is flooding? Flooding, in our consciousness, is often a catastrophe, often climatic collapse; the vocabulary and narrative around flooding are so negative and violent. But growing up in Morocco, I remember that there are regions where people celebrate every flood at some point in the year; it was a seasonal phenomenon, and people were rejoicing. People would chant, sing, and read the Quran: it is a celebratory moment because God gave us what we were praying for to survive: water.

I started to look at Derna from another point of view, which is not about the aftermath of the dams collapse, but rather: what if we didn't have dams? What if this techno-scientific approach we embraced after independence — a Western and colonial approach to tame nature, specifically the desert — was a mistake? What if large-scale projects like the Great Man-Made River Project, which basically pump vast amounts of water to the surface and redistribute them elsewhere, were designed differently or didn't even exist? The first thing which came to mind was this: water is the only form of extraction we don't question — because it's water, it sustains life. Without water, we cannot survive, even if we can without food for some time. Because of that, we actually become uncritical about the extraction of water. That was when I started researching Libya's history and ecologies.

It's incredible how many connections to the land, but also to resistance, can be found in this work. Again, large-scale projects are always narrated from the victorious perspective: "We are greening the desert, bringing water to the desert," and so on. But there was a lot of resistance from humans, nature – the Sahara itself. Last year, I was amazed when I saw images here in Switzerland where people were skiing on yellowish snow because of the Sahara winds, which brought that sand into the clouds. Hearing from scientists who demonstrated that sand — those Saharan winds — is significant for the Atlantic, and the fertilisation of North American soils was the moment for me to connect the dots. That's how I got into this research.

We have been taught that it's important to leave things how they are and to make peace with them. But — as we see now in Palestine and other regions of the world — we can't speak about peace without liberation. And if we want to liberate ourselves, we also have to liberate the lands from these boundaries to give these non-human elements agency back. It is only our imagination that is so scarce, I think.

MAThank you for bringing up the celebration of the flood, celebrating the torrential rain… I was just thinking while you were talking about how the question of extraction is a question of resources, in this case the need of water. You said, no one really questions why we extract water, because it's something without which we cannot survive. There is a relationship to the land that comes with a certain knowledge — perhaps of an intimate knowledge — of the land, its resources, how you engage with them, how you use them or not. And all of that has been totally flooded or breached by systems of capitalism, colonial capitalism, and systems of extraction — where the question of ‘need’ is eradicated. The organisation of resources, of labour, of relations is one that follows the logics and mechanisms of financialization of resources, of land and so on. So when you were talking about the flood, I was thinking also of the flood in an economical sense, as in this surplus. That is, the surplus of production, surplus of extraction, surplus of consumption, which really relates to the question of resources and materials, of course.

I also thought about liberation: you mention Palestine, and the need to liberate the land: the liberation of the people comes with the liberation of the land, it's intertwined. Obviously there is a history of resistance that, at its core, demands the liberation of the land. And this reminds me that there are at least two anti-colonial projects still actively happening in the region, in terms of armed resistance. If one thinks about an anti colonial resistance as a liberation struggle, there’s the Kurdish resistance, and there's the Palestinian struggle. I have engaged a lot with the Kurdish Autonomous Women's Movement in different parts of Kurdistan. This discussion reminds me of a guerilla woman that I met, who talked about the liberation struggle and their impetus to fight, to be armed. It is very much driven by a desire that has, at its core the land — to transmit a relationship to the land, a relationship that is not necessarily one of ownership, extraction and exploitation but a relationship of relationships, a comradeship, a stewardship. in a theological sense, they are custodian of the land, because no one can really own it except for God. So the relationship to land that is determined and fought for is one of usership and almost comradeship, right?

I think that this is what I learned from them: what you want to transmit and what you inherit from a previous generation is this relation. Actually, it is really about that particular relation to a place; particular in the sense that you do inherit knowledge, including very practical knowledge, ways of doing things, certain tools, to maintain that place. At the same time, in a more metaphysical and political sense, you also inherit other relations to land, to the place, to its resources, its mythologies. I was thinking about that, as you pointed at this liberation of the land which is connected to the liberation of the people. This is central to the Kurdish Autonomous Women's Movement and philosophy; it is part of their ecological paradigm, their feminist paradigm. Gender struggles are what drives the movement, but it's also built around an ecological paradigm. Of course, it cannot claim to be non-violent, because it is an armed struggle in a militarised zone; it is an anti-colonial struggle to re-appropriate land. So this is not a peaceful ecological or environmentalist protest.

Land liberation movements and anti-colonial movements have always been armed, but as our parents' generation witnessed the rupture and reaction to anti colonial struggles, in what came after that: these post-colonial states that in most cases, transformed into oligarchies, authoritarian regimes and dictatorships. We inherited a rejection or a reaction to those historic liberatory struggles; this is something that we have to deal with, especially when we talk about anti colonial struggles today.

KOOZ What motivates your ongoing film series, Who is Afraid of Ideology? It's been several years now, I believe you’ve been working on it since 2017. Are you trying to capture the contradictions, or the various ways in which land is or that relationship to it, play out?

MA Yes, totally. I have learned a lot from the Kurdish Autonomous Women's Movement and, of course, other people I have worked with, on accepting political contradiction and understanding it in a more historical sense. I started by saying that I'm (amongst other factors) a product of the neoliberal nineties; for me, it was extremely important to break with that as well. Perhaps my parents' generation would have wanted to break with liberation movements and what they have become. But for me, it was extremely important to go in an opposite or a different direction, and to learn that it is still possible to think through ideologies. It is still possible to think through liberation and liberatory ideologies that are very rooted in land, as well.

SM I love contradictions. Without contradictions, there is no moment of friction, in the sense of production of knowledge, of thought. We need this. The question is, how many contradictions and what kind of contradictions? That's the important nuance we have to bear in mind. There is something beautiful in the non-western world — I don't like the term ‘Global South’ — a beautiful pattern of nuances in non-western regions where such contradictions are part of a philosophical and metaphysical cosmology. I know the second part of Marwa’s film series, in which women are sitting in a half-circle, talking about the security of the small self-organised state that they are trying to administer. It's so beautiful, because you hear the contradictions in their words; you see that contradictions are also an inheritance of any system that you produce. But the question is, how do you deal with them?

That's precisely what I would like to learn, and that's why Libyan oral history and knowledge are crucial. The awareness of contradictions is striking, and people living in the desert are not working against them but trying to understand how to avoid harming habitats shared by humans and non-humans. I learned that through my research, specifically by reading about and listening to nomadic and semi-nomadic oral history, because it's another way of living with nature. When nomadic communities settle anywhere, they connect and relate to the land. It's about healing. In the Sahara, this connection is so beautiful. However, it has a violent history as so many tribes have been banned, settled, displaced and persecuted during the fascist Italian colonisation and the British and French occupation after WWII. This incredible ancestral lineage had been cut off and shut down, but still resisted through rich poetry and practices. Now, my question is, how do we restore these relations to the desert and understand the sociopolitics around water as an agent and resource in times of climate crisis?

KOOZ There's a persistent fallacy that nature will always turn out to be benevolent — which, of course, we made up ourselves. Looking forward in terms of potential reparation, are there ways to predict more enlightened systems of governance, in terms of the asset or use value of land?

Then too, my own relationship to land — certainly my ancestral land — is necessarily detached, as I was not born in my place of origin. I keep reconstructing and questioning the authenticity of this relationship, in the wake of each step towards decolonisation.

SMMarwa said something really important. When you compare the generations — between our parents and ourselves — that they often tried to forget what was, to move on and reconstruct. Because I see reconstruction as a violent, extractive moment in nation building, I always have in mind Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. As I understand Fanon, in order to really appreciate this capitalist colonial system, you have to embrace whiteness, white supremacist rules. This means apartheid rules, displacement, it means land grabbing , land speculation and so on.. When borders were drawn, people had to encounter that space as their new national identity, and to appropriate it they built an infrastructure to possess and control it. This infrastructure is the crystallisation of myopic nationalist movements.

Here, we need to remind ourselves that in Arabic, the word watan has a different meaning than 'nation' in the Western context. Watan is beyond boundaries; it is inherently tied to the land, the space, and the people with whom you share kinship — it has nothing to do with borders and ethnocentric discourses. After colonisation, as the neo-colonial project expanded — even if we had short, beautiful unifying moments in the SWANA region, like Pan Africanism, Pan Arabism, and flourishing in terms of culture, social and political life — ultimately everything felt like a trap. It's a trap of imperialism and capital: the moment these new nations wanted to embrace modernity — not modernity on their own terms, but modernity in the Western conception of progress — they had to embrace it totally and build an infrastructure that sustains it. The technocratic approach works by building large-scale projects, and that's how the Great Man-Made River project started in Libya.

It even used "the master's tools". The Italian fascists came to Libya to green the desert built on an ideology obsessed with Roman expansion and exploitation. The neo-colonial approach reproduced similar obsessions with the same slogan: let's green the deserts. That's the trap we've been in since colonisation, the biggest historic pitfall ever. Independence gave us the impression that we were free, but we'd never been free. Elites were formed during colonisation precisely to enact the apparatus the former colonial rulers needed after independence. This independence was not given for free. That's why I return to Audre Lorde's words: the master's tools are still in use and the rule. I understand what's happening from an intellectual perspective, but I can't absorb it emotionally because it goes against my gut, against my ancestral knowledge.

MA Yeah, it's difficult. I know exactly what you mean. When you start to understand those knowledge systems — even through something like agricultural systems, when you start to understand how these things have completely transformed through the arrival of the French or the British or the Italian mandate, through the colonisation of the majority Arabic-speaking regions — something starts to fall apart, right? The naturalisation of systems of property, for example: the naturalisation of a juridical system and state building, which at its core, holds property as the most sacred thing to defend… When you grow up with these beliefs, that’s the world you know. But when you start to understand and dismantle it — either or both as a practical and an intellectual exercise — these registers start to fall away.

This is when you see, as you note and also referring back to Fanon, that we are always in a neocolonial relation, right? This prominent and the dominant relation, that is built through the petite bourgeoisie class or so. I think this is actually where the work of decolonisation lies. This is the work of trying to dismantle those colonial entities; we see it so clearly now, through the Zionist settler colonial state, and the way it needs to summon all of this power, oppression and violence in order to stay in place? All this genocidal violence, in order to stay, to ground itself somewhere. And this, of course, is not working. We have seen how these regimes fall at the end throughout history. It becomes an act of self-destruction, a self annihilation.

The colonised subject is also not outside of history, right? This subject is formed by and through that history of colonisation, through the transformation of land into property, the arrival of monoculture and cultivation of species, as well various pre-industrial and pre capitalist moments. It’s not an ahistorical subject. For example, the relationship to property that is made through usership, still haunts the juridical system, right? Maybe it doesn't exist legally in certain places: in Palestine, those communal forms of property have been privatised through Zionist settler colonialism, in an accelerated manner. Perhaps in Lebanon you might still see these forms, because it's a slower form of privatisation and transformation to property. In Syria, it is another situation where the socialist Ba'ath regime — as part of a complex and tangled history — actually made property public, so the state holds large proportions of agricultural land. What subsists through these for and what cannot be completely erased — all the while accepting that the colonised subject is also shaped by that relationship to the coloniser — what persists is those ancestral relationships to land, ancestral knowledges and histories. As you were saying, it's almost counter intuitive; when these systems start to dismantle, that’s when you start to see them clearly and you cannot unsee them anymore. You cannot put them back in a drawer and just close it.

KOOZ We certainly can't go home again. There is much value in underlining the contemporary subject, who is somehow aware of all of these processes of disconnection, abstraction, possession, extraction; those processes which we now feel able — at least intellectually — to attempt to dismantle and undo. Ultimately I’d like your thoughts on what that contemporary subject can do, in terms of imagining forward. Perhaps you can talk through your work about how the imaginary plays a role in your work.

SMI think that to use the verb "undo" is ambitious. Let's start before the moment of undoing: we need to unlearn, which implies starting from the very personal. Something needs to happen on a very personal level. We must unlearn that life is linear and that global politics and its history are dissociated from our lives and livelihoods. We must unlearn to critique for the sake of critique and learn to practice the theory we preach – with ourselves and the world around us. And yes, the contradictions are omnipresent, but what kind of and how many contradictions can we and the world hold?

Claiming land means land consciousness, being aware of land politics and how it affects the psychosocial fabric of each of us, humans and non-humans. It's claiming ancestral knowledge and heritage to heal the land and, ultimately, ourselves — rematriation, again. People had always had to fight for land, their identities, the right to exist and the right to return to their ancestral land.

A jump, but a necessary one — reparation. Maybe that's why rematriation and reparation are, for me, not separable. One episode, The Big Payback, of the series Atlanta, is striking as it shows Black Americans suing white people as their forefathers enslaved their ancestors. The whole episode shows how reparations might play out. In the show, it is ultimately not fulfilling because it remains within the capitalist realm. It doesn't break with it – it perpetuates it. Reparation can do more than only put us back in the consumerist chair with more purchasing power. It's perhaps fulfilling at the material monetary level — but it doesn't change the course of capitalist society. At least, that's my perception after watching it. I wanted more than this; I wanted a disruptive narration as Martin Luther King Jr's "broad-based and gigantic compensation bill"— a substantial abolitionist and anti-capitalist reparation system beyond consumerism and class. But maybe it's the intention of the plot to let us wander in our imagination.

MAIt's a huge debate: reparation, compensation, if at all possible, right? If you want to think about the loss in terms of lives, is there any compensation possible for that? The Land Back movement, for instance for Indigenous peoples demands a different equation. It is interesting to think through the premise of return; whether it's a return to a sort of ancestral knowledge system of cosmology or stewardship, or a return to land, to a place — for example, in Palestine, where the right to return is,, one of the core demands of the struggle for years. Then again, when you return, you don't return to the same place, and you don't return as the same subject. You ‘return’ to a completely different place, with a completely different psyche. This is so well described in the novella Returning to Haifa, by Ghassan Kanafani. The whole idea of return and its complexity are laid out in that story, including the face-to-face encounter with the settler, right inside the home from where the two characters in the novel were expelled. It’s not something that can be simplified or flattened; the complexity of the question of a return is something we need to stay with. Any action towards return is often a tool to start the process of dismantling a system, a neoliberal system for the production of capital, settler colonialism and its imposed regime of property etc…. Without that aim, the urgency of compulsion and desire cannot be marshalled; it needs to be there as an imaginary, but an imaginary that is completely revised and rehearsed every day.

Even as part of your everyday life, there's a form of rehearsal that allows you to slowly dismantle a naturalised regime, without quite knowing where you are going to end: you won't end where your ancestors came from, that's for sure. I mean, we know that. It's almost like an impulse towards sharpening your weapons against the colonizers for a world in which you can believe, one where your survival is desired. You get closer to that through this rehearsal of dismantling. I think that maybe “the return” is a premise that should be neither simplified nor given up, and sitting with the discomfort of that process is necessary.

SMI love that. I love that you used the word complexity many times. Simplifying, abstracting things are colonial acts across history; the moment we internalise that abstracted flatness, we erase part of our knowledge and the richness of our ancestry. I mean, to sit with it, embrace complexity, and dismantle the colonial project, it's painful and beautiful at the same time.

KOOZ I couldn't think of a more beautiful synthesis of our conversation. Thank you both, so much.

Bios

Marwa Arsanios is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher who reconsiders mid-twentieth-century politics from a contemporary perspective, with a particular focus on gender relations, spatial practices, and land struggles. She looks at histories of resistances in their contemporary resonance. Arsanios approaches research collaboratively and seeks to work across disciplines. She is the co-founder of the research project and artist organisation 98weeks.

Shehrazade Mahassini is an architect, researcher and educator. In 2022, she founded studio:institute, a critical and transdisciplinary research and spatial practice. Parallel to her practice, Shehrazade is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. Embedded in post/colonial studies, Arab and Afro-feminism, her research aims to create a new narrative and questions the historicity of space production in former colonies and how it relates to segregated urban spaces in contemporary Western society.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.