“Planting Seeds/The Fires of War”: The Geopolitics of Seed Saving in Jumana Manna’s Wild Relatives

Through a reading of Jumana Manna’s feature-length film, Wild Relatives (2018), this article explores the geopolitics of seed saving, reading global efforts to preserve genetic biodiversity in the face of climate change through the logic of the pharmakon (i.e., as both poison and cure). The film follows the journey of seeds between the Global Seed Vault at Svalbard (Norway) and the Bekaa Valley (Lebanon), where seeds from Syria are being cultivated due to the ongoing civil war, probing the relationship between the preservation and (re)patriation of seeds on the one hand and global conflict and humanitarianism on the other, and considering local cultivation practices vis-à-vis the lasting legacies of the developmentalist, geopolitical agendas of the US-sponsored Green Revolution. The article situates the film within Manna’s broader oeuvre, problematizing the epistemological and temporal logic of heritage practices that seek to preserve both cultural and natural diversity. As such, the article demonstrates the neo-orientalist and neo-colonial logic of cryopreservation as a form of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ or techno-capitalist wizardry. Adapting anthropologist Michael Taussig’s notion of ‘agribusiness writing’ to the institutionalised, globalised images and narratives of productivity, bio-conservation and peacemaking, Wild Relatives is interpreted as a form of ‘apotropaic’ (‘countermagical’) filmmaking that warns against the appropriative, ‘green banking’ and ‘green washing’ logic of techno-scientific sorcery and celebrates the reciprocal, co-evolutionary plant–human relations of which the seed itself is an archive

More-than-Human Cosmopolitics

Summary of Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Artists, theorists, activists, and scholars propose concrete forms of non-fascist living as the rise of contemporary fascisms threatens the foundations of common life. Propositions for Non-Fascist Living begins from the urgent need to model a world decidedly void of fascisms during a time when the rise of contemporary fascisms threatens the very foundations of a possibility for common life. Borrowing from Michel Foucault's notion of “non-fascist living” as an “art of living counter to all forms of fascism,” including that “in us all… the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us,” the book addresses the practice of living rather than the mere object of life. Artists, theorists, activists, and scholars offer texts and visual essays that engage varied perspectives on practicing life and articulate methods that support multiplicity and difference rather than vaunting power and hierarchy. Architectural theorist Eyal Weizman, for example, describes an “unlikely common” in gathering evidence against false narratives; art historian and critic Sven Lütticken develops a non-fascist proposition drawn from the intersection of art, technology, and law; philosopher Rosi Braidotti explores an ethics of affirmation and the practices of dying. Propositions for Non-Fascist Living is the first in a BASICS series of readers from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, engaging some of the most urgent problems of our time through theoretically informed and politically driven artistic research and practice. Contributors include: Rosi Braidotti, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jota Mombaça, and Thiago de Paula Souza, Forensic Architecture, Marina Gržinić, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Patricia Kaersenhout and Lukáš Likavčan, Sven Lütticken, Jumana Manna, Dan McQuillan, Shela Sheikh, Eyal Weizman, Mick Wilso

Translating Geontologies

Review essay of Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2016

The Future of the Witness: Nature, Race and More-than-Human Environmental Publics

Taking leave from obstacles to the creation of an 'environmental public' in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa and the political silencing and objectification of both nature and racialised subjects, this article interrogates and seeks to expand a specific figure: that of the witness. In the broader, global context of environmental violence, the witness – who, according to classical theories of testimony, is a sovereign subject who speaks in their own name – is considered in the context of constructed categories of active/passive and subject/object as these play out across race, nature and shifting conceptions of the human. The title, 'the future of the witness', prompts two questions: (i) In the context of (missing) environmental publics, in what ways we must reconceptualise the figure of the witness – on ontological, epistemological and political levels – as we move into the future? (ii) Faced with ever-escalating Anthropocenic destruction, is it possible for a witness to testify not only to past events and experiences, as per the generally accepted temporal schema of witnessing, but also to ongoing experiences that unfold into the future? In responding to these questions, it is argued (a) that the witness can no longer be considered as an isolated figure, but rather must be conceived as part of a testimonial constellation; and (b) that, in responding to ecological concerns, this constellation must be a more-than-human collective: an entangled form of sociality between humans and nonhumans that does not take recourse to modernist categories of 'human' and 'nature'. Moving, via South Africa, from the European Holocaust to global humanitarian and forensic practices, through European and North American science and technology studies as well as Amerindian thinking, the article gathers a generalised set of questions and propositions that might in turn be folded back into specific locales. Key is the classic postcolonial question of who ought to or has the right to speak in the name of whom. Where the witness is often denied self-representation or, more gravely, entirely absent or missing, the article surveys various practices of supplementary witnessing. However, such practices ofen find themselves caught within a representational dilemma whereby, despite the necessity of defending the rights of humans and nonhumans alike, 'speaking for' or 'giving voice' to dispossessed or missing subjects – including nature – runs the risk of further replicating the original colonial matrix of being, knowledge and power that is being contested. Drawing from aesthetic and speculative practices, the article asks what possible strategies might be available for navigating the challenges of representation and for conceiving of more-than-human environmental publics that contest the neoliberal indivisualization of responsibilty and actively bear witness both to unfolding environmental degradation and possible more liveable futures

The Erasure Trilogy: Fazal Sheikh interviewed by Shela Sheikh

In 2010, Fazal Sheikh visited Israel and the West Bank for the first time. Sheikh had been invited to join This Place, a project initiated by the photographer Frédéric Brenner to explore the region through the lenses of twelve internationally-renowned photographers.1 During the course of the many extended visits to the region that were to follow, Sheikh produced three bodies of work—Memory Trace, Desert Bloom, and Independence/Nakba—published collectively by Steidl in 2015 as The Erasure Trilogy. Together, through their juxtaposition of the photographic image and text, the three volumes trace the legacies of the Arab–Israeli War of 1948 and its lasting impact on the Palestinians, Bedouins, and Israelis of the region. While Desert Bloom, the work produced for This Place, has been exhibited in the traveling group exhibition that began in 2014, this spring marks the first simultaneous exhibition of all three elements.2 Collectively presented under the title Erasures, the trilogy internally opens up in a movement of dispersal across multiple institutions, each with differing remits, and with this distinct, albeit often overlapping, audiences: the Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), the Brooklyn Museum, the Pace/MacGill Gallery, and Storefront for Art and Architecture (all New York), the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art (East Jerusalem), and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center (Ramallah).3 To mark the occasion of this ambitious curatorial gesture, the interview that follows has been published through the Slought Foundation, where Sheikh is currently artist-in-residence. This discussion, which took place in Zurich in the summer of 2014, was initially commissioned by the This Place project, and appeared in an abridged and edited form in the group exhibition catalogue, published by MACK.4 Here, Sheikh reflects upon his initial responses to the region, the genesis and challenges of each of the elements of the trilogy, as well as the relations between them and his hopes for their effectivity, and his mode of working more broadly. As such, together with the extensive documentation provided both within the Erasure Trilogy publications and across the venues, as well as a series of artist’s talks programed for this spring, the conversation lends further context to the multiplatformed curatorial event of Erasures, which takes as its point of departure the following works

Violence

To think violence today requires that we reposition ourselves, philosophically, legally, politically and ethically, in the space between certain extremes, themselves built upon violent historical categorisations and exclusions: human/nonhuman, subject/object, culture/nature, physis/tekhnē, active/passive; the list goes on...

After Capital: Towards Alternative Worlds

Transcript of presentation given at Professor Couze Venn Memorial and Celebration, Goldsmiths, University of London, 22 May 2019. Part of a special issue of Subjectivity dedicated to the work of Couze Venn. Response to Couze Venn, After Capital (Sage, 2018)

Independence/Nakba

On June 19, we published photographs from Memory Trace, which is part of Fazal Sheikh’s magnificent Erasure Trilogy about the attempted erasure of Palestinian history and life after the Nakba. We said we would publish reflections about photographs from Erasure that were first shared at Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2016, where Fazal’s photographs were on display at Storefront’s gallery space. At this inspiring gathering, scholars and artists, Emmet Gowin, Amira Hass, Rashid Khalidi, Rosalind Morris, Shela Sheikh, Michael Wood and Sadia Abbas were each asked to speak about an image from the trilogy. Some spoke extemporaneously and some—like Rosalind, Shela, and Sadia — read from texts we had written. Rosalind chose an image from Desert Bloom and Shela from Independence/Nakba. We reached out to Rosalind and Shela to ask them if they would share their wonderful meditations with our readers, and they generously agreed. On June 25, we published Rosalind Morris’s reflection. Today we publish Shela Sheikh’s meditation

The Madness of the Mother Tongue

Through a reading of Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other: Or, the Prosthesis of Origin, this text explores the maddening paradoxes of identity, translation, the mother tongue, and the coloniality of language and culture. How to speak of oneself and one’s experience when one has no ‘proper’ language in which to do so – when one’s testimony must always be an act of translation? When translation – both literally and in an expanded sense – is simultaneously both possible and impossible? When one’s relationship to one’s ‘own’ language (the so-called mother tongue) is both cause and symptom of a ‘disorder of identity’? And when the desire for the mastery of language and self-representation involves the risk of precisely the (colonial) expropriation or usurpation that is being testified to

Corinne Silva: plants, power and the Israeli state

The photographer examines the links between cultivation and colonisation