Film screening of Gian Spina’s On Bandits (2023)

June 27, 2023 | Barzakh Bookshop & Café | 8:00pm

In 2022, the economic crisis in Lebanon had led the country to the brink of total collapse. By the time this film began was completed, more than 16 bank heists had been carried out across the country. Assembling interviews with depositors and the critical theorist Nadia Bou Ali along with archival images and TV material, On Bandits tries to make sense of the surreal situation in which the country finds itself.

Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Gian Gigi Spina is a writer, researcher, and sometimes an artist. He has worked and taught in pedagogical experiments, including International Art Academy Palestine, Escola da Cidade (São Paulo), the Ionion Center for Arts and Culture (Greece) as well as CILAS (Cairo). He is currently learning Arabic, while speaking five other languages, and is constructing an interdisciplinary body of work on the materialization of power in history, narrative and the public sphere. He was part of the residency programs as Capacete and Documenta 14 in Athens (2017), MMAG Foundation in Amman (2018) as well as GEGENWARTE/PRESENCES in Chemnitz, Germany (2020). Recently, he has participated in the Sheffield Film Festival, Les Rencontre d’Arles and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. His writing has appeared in Mada Masr, Folha de São Paulo, Arts Everywhere, World Policy Institute, and several other independent publications. He lives Cairo and his work can be seen at http://gianspina.com

This event is organized by the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) for the 2023 Summer School, Is There a Revolutionary Subject? For more information, please visit https://bicarlebanon.org/summerschool/