Manna’s essay film documents the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway before spiraling off to cover related complexities. The Global Seed Vault stores backup copies of the world’s plant species in case one of the thousands of smaller gene banks scattered across the planet are ever destroyed. The latter scenario nearly played out in Aleppo with the escalation of the Syrian Civil War. The city’s seed bank was replicated by withdrawing seeds from the Svalbard Vault and replanting them in Lebanon’s Bekka Valley. In Wild Relatives, Manna shows both the connections and disparities between this international initiative and its local implementation. Exposing tensions between preservation methods—state and individual, industrial and organic—Manna highlights the differing realities, divergent concerns, and unequal futures at stake in this journey of seeds. (66 mins., DCP)
Wild Relatives first screened at the Wexner Center in 2018 and returns in conjunction with the autumn 2023 exhibition Jumana Manna: Break, Take, Erase, Tally. Visit the galleries to see more of Manna’s work.
IMAGE CAPTION
Jumana Manna, Wild Relatives (video still), 2018. 2K video, 5.1 sound; 64 mins. Courtesy the artist; Brief Histories, New York; and Hollybush Gardens, London.
