10 June 2020 @ 6pm screening / 7.15pm talk
Online Film Screening: Wild Relatives
64min, HD video, 2018
https://fakultaetnull.org/
start at 6pm: via Fakultät Null website
Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: in 2012 an international agricultural re- search center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of en- counters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. It captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young migrant women. The meditative pace patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and or- ganic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds.
Artist Talk with Jumana Manna
Jumana will focus on recent projects that deal with the paradoxes of the modernist urge to categorize and preserve. This urge often entails an artificial freezing of time; that on the one hand keeps a record of cultural forms that are perhaps no longer apparent today but often is the very roots of the erasure of those forms.
1 hour talk with q&a afterwards
https://fakultaetnull.org/
starts at 7.15pm: via Fakultät Null website
Jumana Manna (b. 1987) is a visual artist working primarily with film and sculpture. Her work explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focusing on the body and materiality in relation to narratives of nationalism, and histories of place. She was awarded the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Palestinian Artist Award in 2012 and the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts in 2017. Manna has participated in various film festivals and exhibitions, including Henie Onstad Museum, Norway, 2018; Mercer Union, Canada, 2017; Jeu de Paume and CAPC Bordeaux, France, 2017; SculptureCenter, USA, 2014; Marrakech Biennale 6, 2016; The Nordic Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale; as well as the 54th and 56th Viennale International Film Festivals, 66th and 68th Berlinale and CPH:DOX 2018, where Wild Relatives won the New:Visions award. Manna was raised in Jerusalem and is currently based in Berlin.
more info:
artist website: https://www.jumanamanna.com/
wild relatives film trailer and full description/credits: https://www.jumanamanna.com/Wild-Relatives