Jumana Manna

Une caméra emboîte le pas à des hommes et des machines qui traversent des paysages typiques, et attire notre attention sur le phénomène de la germination des semences.
Le film de Jumana Manna, Wild Relatives, explore le système de hiérarchies et de relations de pouvoir qui entoure la transaction de semences entre deux points distants du globe, Longyearbyen sur l’île de Svalbard, dans l’Océan Arctique, et la ville de Terbol dans la vallée de Bekaa, au Liban. Le film suit le parcours de ces semences, mettant en lumière les processus de déplacement de différentes formes de vie dans et hors du sol, de terres arides au permafrost.

Palestinian artist Jumana Manna (born in the United States in 1987) makes films and sculptures
that explore the ways in which social, political and interpersonal forms of power interact with the human body. Her films weave together fact and fiction, biographical and archival materials, to investigate constructions of national and historical narratives. Her sculptures, more abstract
by comparison, take interest in the calcifications of memory, as represented by the artefact real
or forged.
In recent projects, Manna has used film and sculpture to recompose various archival materials
that pertain to historical narratives of the Levant and northern Europe as separate and relational
geographies. These works have explored the ways in which economic, political and interpersonal
forms of power condition architectural sites as well as human and plant life. Manna has a particular
interest in the erasures that accompany various modern scientific preservation practices; her projects
challenge the binary constructions of a pure and unchanging heritage on the one hand, and the
embrace of innovation on the other.
In her newly commissioned work Wild Relatives, Manna follows the matrix of hierarchies and
relationships involved in a transaction of seeds between the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen in
Svalbard, an island in the Arctic Ocean, and the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. The film travels the path
of these seeds and traces motifs of extracting and placing different life forms from and into the ground, back and forth from dry lands to permafrost.