Floating Cinema 2026

Once again this year, TBA21–Academy / Ocean Space is taking part in Floating Cinema ~ Unknown Waters, the cultural festival that brings film screenings, performances and live music to the waters of Sacca Fisola.

On Tuesday, September 8, we are presenting a programme of screenings that engage with the exhibition Tide of Returns and the TBA21 publication Palestine is Everywhere.

• The Incidental Insurgents, Part 1: The Part about the Bandits, Chapter 2, by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (2012/2013)

In their three-part work, The Incidental Insurgents, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme investigate the intricate network of histories, geographies, and revolutionary moments that write, and rewrite, the narratives of resistance. The three parts of the series are each made up of an audiovisual work within a larger installation.

In The Part About the Bandits, Part 1 of The Incidental Insurgents series, the duo embarked on an introspective investigation of the role of the artist in times of crisis. Research began in 2011 when they delved into the histories of “incidental insurgents,” including Victor Serge and his contemporary anarchist-bandits in early 1900 Paris; Abu Jilda and Arameet and their gang involved in a rebellion against the British in 1930s Palestine, the artist-poet as the quintessential bandit in Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives set in 1970s Mexico, and the artists themselves in present-day Palestine. 

Following the thin narrative threads that were available to them lead Abbas and Abou-Rahme to discussions with experts on the bandit’s individual histories, as well as to national and international archives containing forgotten clippings on these seemingly disparate individuals. What they discovered reveals the nature of the narratives of revolution – including what is omitted and the deep significance behind these exclusions.

• Foragers, by Jumana Manna (2022)

Foragers depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. 

The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further disposses them from their land while the occupation's state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. 

Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.

• The Moon Says It's in Vienna, by Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll (2025)

The Moon Says It's in Vienna is the second film in Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll's trilogy. Following the performance poem of the same title, staged by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Samson Ogiamien at the opening of Tide of Returns at Ocean Space, the film follows the Mask of Iyagbon as it enters Vienna's Weltmuseum to confront the institution's Benin Bronze collection. 

The mask made by Samson Ogiamien —an imagined amalgam of all the bronzes looted during the 1897 British invasion of Benin City, alongside those since returned—performs a ritual of remembrance, mourning and restitution. 

Moving through the museum as both witness and ancestor, it calls the dispersed works home, transforming the gallery into a space where colonial violence, cultural memory and spiritual return converge. The film imagines repatriation not only as the return of objects, but as an ongoing ritual of repair.

Reservation required at www.cinemagalleggiante.it.

Opening at 6pm, first boarding at 7:30pm, program starts at 8pm.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Across their works they probe a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless ‘present’, one that is shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. They have been developing a body of work that questions this suspension of the present and searches for ways in which an altogether different imaginary and language can emerge that is not bound within colonial/capitalist narrative and discourse. In their projects, they find themselves excavating, activating and inventing incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites as material for re-imagining the possibilities of the present. Often reflecting on ideas of non-linearity in the form of returns, amnesia and deja vu, and in the process unfolding the slippages between actuality and projection (virtuality, myth, wish), what is and what could be. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multi-media installations and live sound/image performances.

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Jerusalem and Berlin. Her work explores the articulations of power through the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Moving between the seemingly divergent media of film, abstract sculpture, and collage, Manna addresses how performing bodies, material fragments, and landscapes both desire and narrate pasts, presents, and futures that remain excessive to the violences imposed upon them. Her work has dealt with the paradoxes of preservation – particularly with regards to land practices and the law – probing the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life, and regeneration.

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, born in Naarm (Melbourne) Australia, is an artist and filmmaker. She is a Professor of History and Director of the EU Horizon 2020 project REPATRIATES: Artistic Research in Museums and Communities in the Process of Repatriation from Europe and the collective of artists and researchers that are part of it. She earned a PhD in Art and Architectural History from Harvard University and is the author of the books Art in the Time of Colony; The Importance of Being Anachronistic: Contemporary Aboriginal Art and Museum Reparations; Botanical Drift; Bordered Lives: Immigration Detention Archive, The Contested Crown: Repatriation Politics between Mexico and Europe and the forthcoming Voyages of Belonings: Art and Repatriation, based on this project. Her artistic practice combines word and image montages in film and installations, giving voice to alternative narratives through text and performance. Her works have been presented in numerous international exhibitions and artistic research projects including at the Venice, Marrakech, Atlantic and Sharjah Biennales, ZKM, Manifesta, Wien Woche, Extracity, Savvy, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, MAA Cambridge, Royal Museums Greenwich, Frieze London, and the Wende Museum LA. She has won awards at Casablanca, Ethnokino and St Kilda film festivals.