Harvest Assembly
A Closing Assembly by
In this closing assembly, we collect the harvest from the three-day study circle. Each artist collective shares the insights, questions, and inspirations they’ve gathered about cinema’s potential as a method and medium for rehearsing collective organizing, militant imagination, and liberatory transformation.
The session is introduced and hosted by Massimiliano Mollona, who coordinates the eponymous long-term project Cinema as Assembly, which explores militant cinema through the histories of Third Cinema, Indigenous, and anti-racist filmmaking. Writer and producer Shakerifar will share her insights from facilitating the sharing sessions with the artist collectives.
Massimiliano Mollona is an anthropologist and filmmaker. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Brazil and England, around themes of class, work, post-capitalism and decoloniality through a participatory methodology that combines anthropological analysis and artistic interventions. Mollona has taught Anthropology of Art and Political Anthropology at Goldsmiths, London and currently teaches at the Department of the Arts (DAR) at the University of Bologna. He was director of the Athens Biennial OMONIA; co-director of the Bergen Assembly and is founding member of the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI).
Elhum Shakerifar is a writer and translator, currently translating Parinaz Fahimi's poetry and part of the 24/25 Southbank New Poets cohort. Elhum is also a BAFTA-nominated producer, most recently Executive Producer of Clear Night, Helene Kazan’s multi-sensory investigative homage to Asmahan for the 2025 Sharjah Biennial. She has programmed for London Film Festival (2014-21), Shubbak – festival of contemporary Arab culture (2015-19), Barbican (Poetry in Motion: Contemporary Iranian Cinema, 2019), BFI (Drama & Desire, the films of Youssef Chahine, 2023) and is on the board of the Palestine Film Institute, co-curating the Palestine Film Platform. Elhum runs the London-based company Hakawati (‘storyteller’ in Arabic) @TheHakawatis.
Forum Lenteng is an egalitarian non-profit organization based in Jakarta, dedicated to developing social and cultural studies. Founded in 2003 by communication students, artists, researchers, and cultural observers, the forum focuses on expanding its members' knowledge of media and art through production, documentation, research, and open distribution. This knowledge serves as a foundation for community discussions on social issues through the lens of art and media. Over more than a decade, Forum Lenteng has grown significantly, developing numerous programs in collaboration with various institutions and communities across Indonesia and internationally. As a dynamic collective, Forum Lenteng addresses film and moving images as processes of collective research, creation, and viewing. They facilitate workshops, film screenings (both open and closed sessions), writing initiatives, and other activities to explore image-making as a form of social practice.
Since 2017 werkt Marinho de Pina samen met Filipa César, Sana na N’Hada en Suleimane Biai over de Mediateca Abotcha in Guinee-Bissau (mediateca-onshore.org), een programma voor de culturele creatie van dromen en utopieën met de lokale gemeenschap. Samen managen, produceren, cureren, communiceren en animeren ze culturele activiteiten, waarbij ze een collectieve verkenning faciliteren van militante cinemapraktijken van de Afrikaanse bevrijdingsbeweging in Guinee-Bissau en hun voortdurend potentieel. Marinho de Pina co-regisseerde de feature-length essay film Resonance Spiral met Filipa César die in première ging op het Berlinale Forum in 2024. Als onderzoeksassistent aan DIN MIA’CET-ISCTE, het Centrum voor Studies over Socio-economische Verandering en Territorium, werkt hij momenteel aan een PhD over heilige ruimtes in Bissau. Marinho is een uitgesproken woordkunstenaar en verhalenverteller, bedreven in verschillende formats. Hij is er rotsvast van overtuigd dat twijfels te verkiezen zijn boven starre zekerheden. Als transdisciplinair kunstenaar is hij ook performer, dichter, muzikant en schrijver, zelfs in het weekend en op feestdagen.
La Voix des sans papiers (VSP) is a collective of self-organized undocumented people in Brussels. Founded in 2014, the collective organizes political occupations and is connected with other collectives in Brussels, Liège, Verviers, and Mons. These occupations serve as spaces for political struggle and survival, with the central demand being the regularization of all undocumented people. Through their fight for rights, VSP builds bridges with various forms of support: associations, collectives, unions, and supportive citizens. Over the past ten years, filmmakers Mieriën Coppens and Elie Maissin have created a collection of short films with VSP that are part of a growing series. These documentaries stand alone but collectively testify to a dedicated vision and a meticulous, socially engaged working method.
Marwa Arsanios addresses structural questions using different devices, forms and strategies. From investigating the conflict-driven transformation of architecture to exploring artist-run spaces and temporary conventions between feminist communes and cooperatives, her practice aims to make space within − and without − existing art structures to experiment with different kinds of politics. She frequently uses the medium (and space) of film to connect struggles as if they were images. In her ongoing film series Who is Afraid of Ideology (since 2017), she weaves an intersectional path through the resistance of women on the frontline in places such as Northern Syria and Colombia to claim the unmediated right to land and water.
With these works, Arsanios has adopted a new materialist perspective on these issues, focusing on feminist movements and historic land struggles. In this approach, she explores questions of property, law, economy, and ecology while looking at specific plots of lands and the people who work on them.
