Group screening of Wild Relatives (64min, HD video, 2018) by Jumana Manna.
Followed by exchanges with the artist. Through sculpture, film, and writing, Jumana Manna addresses the paradoxes of curatorial practices, particularly in the fields of archaeology, agriculture, and law. Her practice considers the tension between modernist traditions of categorization and conservation and the unruly potential of the perishable as integral to life and its regeneration. Jumana grew up in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.
"Deep in the earth, beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from around the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup in case of disaster. Wild Relatives begins with an event that garnered worldwide media attention: in 2012, an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian revolution turned into war, and began an arduous process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard Safeguards. Following the path of this seed transaction between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unveil a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant places on earth. The film captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, carried out primarily by young migrant women. The meditative pace patiently untangles the tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, evidenced by the journey of these seeds."
Afternoon:
Visit of the exhibitions Difé and La nuit by Minia Biabiany, Palais de Tokyo
Accompanied by Yoann Gourmel, curator of the exhibitions
In her work, Minia Biabiany questions the relationship to territory and place from the Caribbean and Guadeloupean context - its poetics, its colonial history, its present as a dominated territory under assimilation. Her artistic approach is accompanied by the conception of pedagogical tools in search of autonomous learning and ways of inhabiting the tensions of this territory, of an ongoing sensitivity to the places in which she evolves, as well as the putting into dialogue of the different voices that have signaled through history the processes of coloniality of the island region she inhabits. In her practice, weaving serves as a paradigm for thinking about the structures of narrative and language that open to a multiplicity of modes of knowledge, while drawing in space engages a way of actively interacting with one's own perception. How is the perception of space shaped by our own history in both physical and mental ways? Conversely, how is psychological and mental space impacted by the space around us? (text: Palais de Tokyo)