Six Episodes on Non-Property
Six Episodes on Non-Property is a program emerging from a long-term study group on the question of Non-Property - understood as a conceptual expansion and a set of practices that challenge the notion of property as a social, economic, political, and theoretical category. The program unfolds as a series of study sessions developed in the framework of the Extended Library at HFBK Hamburg. Each episode attempts to engage the possibility of non-property through the work or practice of one author, artist, or group. While trying to strategically poke at the question of private property from different angles and using different registers, knowledge spheres, and practices, the project aims to carve out a space for a different relationship of usership, ownership, and collective cultivation.
While the racial regimes of the world (historically and today) sacralize, perpetuate, and protect private property and naturalize it as a necessary condition for modern personhood, there exist in opposition various instances of fierce resistance through collectivization and communalization practices. The episodes aspire to sketch out a discursive and embodied map for the possibility of non-property.
Marwa Arsanios’ practice tackles structural and infrastructural questions using different devices, forms and strategies. From architectural spaces, their transformation and adaptability throughout conflict, to artist-run spaces and temporary conventions between feminist communes and cooperatives, the practice tends to make space within and parallel to existing art structures allowing experimentation with different kinds of politics. Film becomes another form and a space for connecting struggles in the way images refer to each other. In the past four years Arsanios has been attempting to think about these questions from a new materialist and a historical materialist perspective with different feminist movements that are struggling for their land. She tries to look at questions of property, law, economy and ecology from specific plots of land. The main protagonists become these lands and the people who work them. Her research includes many disciplines and is deployed in numerous collective methodologies and collaborative projects. She is currently a Fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Studies (HIAS).
Lama El Khatib is a writer and cultural worker based in Berlin. Since 2018 she has worked at Haus der Kulturen der Welt as a curatorial coordinator, researcher, and producer. Her work draws on abolitionist traditions and is invested in a poetics of “the labor of the dead”.