Philip Rizk
Land Listening, 2025
In the hull of The Literature Boat Epos, Land Listening creates a space in close proximity to the water nearby, in which the visitor is invited to reflect upon the diverse histories that flow through rivers and their environs. The protagonists in Philip Rizk’s film are the River People — Nubian communities who belong to a cosmology that entails relationships among all kinds of beings. In the film, the narration of their story can be heard over images of the dam in Aswan, Egypt.
When the construction for the Aswan High Dam began in 1964, the state dispossessed over a hundred Nubian communities from their ancestral lands in Upper Egypt leading to the severing of their close bond with the river. The dam has therefore caused the erosion of countless stories and oral histories. Rizk asks, 60 years later, will we let them expire altogether?
Rizk’s practice questions narratives of the dominant through research, filmmaking, and writing. With Land Listening, the filmmaker excavates a scope of poetic knowledge that allows a place within it for the River People’s narratives and presence that has been violently concealed.
Philip Rizk (b. 1982) is a filmmaker and writer from Cairo. In his films he experiments with methods of Ostranenie (making the habitual strange). In Out on the Street (2015), co-directed with Jasmina Metwaly, he uses performance practices, while in Land Listening (2024) and his found-footage films Mapping Lessons (2020), Terrible Sounds (2022), and Terror Tales (2024), he experiments with the technique of montage. In what he deems to be a world that is breaking down, a question that runs throughout Rizk’s projects is, ‘how do we prepare ourselves for what is to come?’ Rizk is a member of The Mosireen Collective, which is also behind the archive 858.ma, which collected footage in Egypt around the revolution His writings include the essay ‘2011 is Not 1968: A Letter to an Onlooker’, ‘A Letter to the-Survivors-of-the-Old-Time’, and the co-edited upcoming book Neocolonialism and its Dismantling, which puts Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in conversation with the revolutions of the Arabic-speaking region over the past 15 years. Rizk irregularly teaches in classrooms and workshops. You can follow his work at filfilfilm.com. He lives and works in Berlin.
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