Reverse Shots and Acoustic Ecologies: Marwa Arsanios’s and Nida Sinnokrot’s “Fighting Realism”

This article examines Marwa Arsanios’s film Part 4: Reverse Shot (2022) and Nida Sinnokrot’s sound-installations Sonic Faza3a (2022) and Storytelling Stones (in-progress), which in different ways explore alternative modes of relating to and representing the land that seek to call into question colonial and capitalist relations of private property. Reverse Shot – the fourth and last instalment of Who Is Afraid of Ideology? (2017–22), Arsanios’s series of films on land struggles – documents the attempt to release a plot of land in Northern Lebanon from the private property regime. Sinnokrot’s sound-installations emerge as part of the project of Sakiya, a progressive academy for experimental knowledge production that combines local agrarian traditions with contemporary art and ecological practices, opened in 2019 in the village of Ein Qiniya, near Ramallah (Occupied Palestinian Territories). In their distinct practices, both Arsanios and Sinnokrot propose alternative representations of land and its use by referring back to the practice of mashaa (loosely translated as commons): a system of communal land tenure characterised by a periodic redistribution of agricultural plots among peasant cultivators prevalent in the Levant up until the early twentieth century. They further engage with agroecological, geological and microbial modes of understanding and portraying the land, as well as folkloric knowledge, storytelling traditions and embodied performance. Countering the ‘instrumental realism’ of colonial-capitalist cartographic representations of the land, they critically redefine questions of realism and representation from an anticolonial and non-anthropocentric perspective. As this article suggests, Arsanios’s and Sinnokrot’s alternative representational practices are not merely invested in the project of critically mapping present social realities but in developing a ‘fighting realism’ that seeks to imagine possible futures and modes of living beyond colonial-capitalist regimes of private property.