Usufructuaries of earth chapters two and three

Chapter two, reading groups and online publication (March 7, 2024–ongoing) and chapter three, convention (May 24–25, 2024).

Convened together by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and artist Marwa Arsanios, Usufructuaries of earth unfolds in three chapters. Along with chapter one of the project—an exhibition by Arsanios—chapter two unfolds through a federated structure of reading groups in Amman, Berlin, and Rotterdam, as well as a slow-growing reader and learning curriculum on BAK’s online publishing forum Prospections. The discussions emerging from the reading groups generate texts, interviews, annotations, and artistic contributions that are further unpacked during both the working sessions and public program of the third project’s chapter: the convention. 

The convention is a two-day gathering of artists, as well as other thinkers and social actors, to share and learn on usufruct as a way of undoing property from the regimes of privatization that perpetually usurp the earth’s resources for the interests of a select few. This culminating chapter inquires into practices of ethically sharing the earth’s usufruct, and ways of transfiguring regimes of ownership into communal userships. 

Taking place on-site at BAK on May 24 and 25, 2024, the convention brings together feminist, decolonial, and ecological practices to undo possessive imaginaries of earth, conjuring instead usufructuaries as mutually reciprocal userships of and with earth. Artists, farmers, women’s and indigenous rights activists, ecologists, legal scholars, political economists, geographers, and community organizers gather to align and learn from each other’s lived and imagined experiences. These include communal, non-expropriative userships in relation to land, housing, social reproduction, agriculture, knowledge, and culture. Speaking from situated geographies of abolitionist, Black, and feminist struggles, alongside legal perspectives on decolonizing property law and collective land reclamation as responses to generations of dispossession, Usufructuaries of earth connects the propositions of usufruct in ways that challenge the deeply entrenched ideology of private property that has come to be accepted as immovable bedrock of today’s global contemporary political formation.  

The convention is composed of working sessions and a public program. Four working sessions with invited contributors and participants selected through an open call take place on May 24, 2024. (maximum capacity of 12 people per session). If you wish to join, please send an email to opencall@bakonline.org by midnight, May 14, 2024, wherein you introduce yourself, indicate which working group you would like to join, and give a short written motivation of no more than 200 words. For more info on each of the working sessions and to apply, please see here. 

A public program follows during the evening of May 24 and on May 25, 2024, consisting of propositions, plenary conversations, sonic interludes, and commensal moments. The contributors to the convention and the attending public narrate, learn, and share vocabularies, approaches, methods, and imaginaries that center regeneration over ecological destruction and collective usership over individuated profit, forming transgenerational alliances between usufructuaries of earth that have gone before, are happening in the present, or are yet to be. For full public program see here.

Confirmed convention contributors include: Joud Al-Tamimi, Marwa Arsanios, Bahaleen Collective, Clara Balaguer, b.ASIC a.CTIVIST k.ITCHEN, Asia Bazdyrieva, Aya Bseiso, Brenna Bhandar, Lucí Cavallero, Iliada Charalambous, Luigi Coppola, Philippa Driest, Lama El Khatib, Patricia Enriquez, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Layal Ftouni, Verónica Gago, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Grupo Semillas (Samanta Arango Orozco and Arelly Collazos), Stefano Harney, Ola Hassanain, Maria Hlavajova, Jinwar (Lena Wilderbach and Elif Kaya), Carmen José, Grace Lostia, Wietske Maas, MADEYOULOOK (Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho), Dina Mohamed, Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona, Yvonne Phyllis, Philip Rizk, Sakiya (Tareq Khalaf and Nida Sinnokrot), Shela Sheikh, and Khadija Tahiri-Hyati. For more information, see here.

Usufructuaries of earth has been conceptualized by Marwa Arsanios and BAK’s curator for research and publications Wietske Maas, in conversation with respective contributors to the project’s three chapters and the BAK team. 

The activities of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht are made possible with the financial support of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the City Council, Utrecht. Usufructuaries of earth is part of the long-term BAK research itinerary Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–2024).