Arbeitstitel:

Listening to Land: De-neocolonizing the imaginary

Betreuung: Prof. Dr. Michaela Ott

Today the world is in crisis, one that has been driven by a “habit of being” created by modernity, capitalism and colonialism, defined by the glorification of knowledge and the disease of growth.[1] The project Listening to Land, which originates from the bodily experience of neocoloniality in the Arab world, has a twofold aim. First, to address this habit of being by expanding classical de-colonization theory with its incessant tie to the nation-state in both theory and cinema. In its place I will insist on a process of de-neocolonization for which in this project I will address only one domain, the relationship of humans and land. Colonialism after all begins with a taking of land.[2] I want to ask, how can we unlearn the current neo-colonial stance towards the land that is built on the foundation of private property, boundaries and borders. Second, I will seek to explore a visual language that might address the crisis of this neo-colonial moment. Rather than ask how image-making can help propose an alternative world, I want to ask can and if, how can images question the norms, or make strange - ostranenie - these habits of being, with the aim of preparing ourselves to face a world gone bad.[3] We will not find quick, nor easy, and possibly no solutions to this crisis we are in, but we must find a way to persevere to survive it, which we may begin by examining the “discursive regimes... that police the boundaries of [y]our imagination... and to reconnect with the metabolism we are a part of, the earth.”[4]

In Listening to Land I will spend time with the land to let its stories form on my skin. I will research indigenous feminist approaches to land and the history of the commons as collectively owned and worked land. These processes will feed into the production of a short experimental animation film, the publication of a book and the formation of a network of farmers and cultural practitioners who take seriously the revision of their relationship with land as an anti-capitalist, anti-modernity stance, with the aim of putting the earth back at the center of life.

(1) See Forbes, 1979, 46. The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, 2020.

(2) Schmitt, 2003. 48.

(3) Shklovksy, 2017, 24.

(4) The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, 2020.


Vita:

Philip Rizk is a film-maker and writer from Cairo living in Berlin. In his films he experiments with methods of “making the habitual strange.” He did this through performance in Out on the Street (2015) and Exercises on Trials (2016) and through the technique of montage in his found footage films Mapping Lessons (2020) and The Ghosts of Tutankhamun (work in progress). In a world that is breaking down, a question that runs throughout Rizk’s projects is, how do we prepare ourselves for what is to come? Rizk is a member of the Mosireen video collective behind the archive 858.ma. His texts have appeared online, in journals and in collected volumes including “2011 is not 1968: a letter to an onlooker.” He regularly teaches in classrooms and workshops.