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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© Philip Rizk Philip Rizk, Land Listening, 2025.

Screening Programme
The Literature Boat Epos, 10.–11. October 2025

Razan Al-Salah, A Stone’s Throw, 2024
Ricardo Lua, Sinfonia do Alto Ribeira, 1985
Philip Rizk, Mapping Lessons, 2020

This two-part screening programme, curated and introduced by Philip Rizk, brings together three films that think with images, against the telling of history, and without the dominance of Man. The first evening features two films, A Stone’s Throw (2024) (40 minutes) by Razan Al-Salah and Sinfonia do Alto Ribeira (1985) (46 minutes) by Ricardo Lua, in which water appears in different forms.

Al-Salah’s film follows Amine, a Palestinian elder displaced twice from Haifa to Beirut and later to an offshore oil platform, revealing an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region, and the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. Meanwhile, Lua’s documentary captures composer Hermeto Pascoal and his band creating music inside Brazil’s endangered Atlantic rainforest in the southern state of São Paulo. They used found materials and environmental acoustics to explore sound in relation to the landscape, which is under constant pressure from the steady encroachment of civilization.

Lua and Al-Salah’s films work in conversation with Rizk’s Land Listening (2025) (11 minutes), which is displayed in the hull of the Literature Boat Epos throughout the duration of across, with, nearby. Here, visitors are invited to reflect upon the diverse histories that flow through rivers and their environments.

The second evening features Philip Rizk’s Mapping Lessons (2020)(61 minutes). In this essay-film, the protagonist K travels through time and space to a ‘Middle East’ that is being colonised; where fences form borders of private property and national boundaries. The film narrates a series of struggles against this status quo on the eastern Mediterranean. It also juxtaposes these with the manifold struggles that have existed elsewhere, such as the war in Vietnam; attempts at national liberation in Angola and in Palestine; the collapse of state structures during the Syrian Revolution — as in the Paris Commune; and reformulating property laws in the early days of the Soviet Union as well as 1936 Spain. In doing so, the film tries to mark ways of preparing for difficulties to come.