The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation presents The Land Shall Not Be Owned, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios (1978).

At the center of the exhibition project is Who is Afraid of Ideology? (2017–ongoing), the long-term project and film series by Arsanios that investigates the processes of exploitation and reappropriation of land and the local struggles for its claim in different geographies of the Middle East and South America. The exhibition marks the international premiere of the fifth and most recent chapter, co-produced by the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, presented alongside the four previous ones. The exhibition unfolds in reverse chronological order, retracing the five video installations in dialogue with drawings, textile sculptures, embroideries, and banners, stemming from each chapter to amplify its imagery.

Who is Afraid of Ideology? is an in-depth and continuously evolving investigation into the politics of land distribution and extraction, with particular attention to local struggles for their claim in Kurdistan, Iraq, northeastern Syria, Colombia, and Lebanon. Through the five films, Arsanios highlights forms of self-organization and self-defense of female communities, exploring new paradigms through which they challenge patriarchal structures such as the family itself, the state, or multinational corporations. A collective portrait and mapping emerge, international yet always situated in context, where ecological, feminist, indigenous, and decolonial perspectives converge to shape new practices of political autonomy. In addition to the films, the project takes the form of conferences, reading groups, publications, and more. The latest initiative was Usufructuaries of Earth, a conference co-organized with Wietske Maas at BAK in Utrecht.

With Who is Afraid of Ideology?, Arsanios also rethinks the form and function of cinema itself. The film becomes a tool to disseminate knowledge and build an international network of organizations and communities engaged in struggles for social and political change. At the same time, the artist develops technical and narrative strategies to deconstruct the documentary format, historically ethnographic, extractive, and partial, breaking the conventions of the interview, disconnecting audio and images, making audible the instructions and dialogues between direction and subjects filmed.