This event is part of Twenty Years of Kunsthal Extra City
Foragers
Jumana Manna, 2022, 64′ (looped)
In Arabic and Hebrew, with English subtitles
With ‘Foragers’ (2022), Jumana depicts the dramas of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee, and Jerusalem, it blends fiction, documentary, and archival footage to illustrate the impact of Israeli nature protection laws. Restrictions prohibit collecting certain native plants like ’akkoub and za’atar, resulting in fines and trials for hundreds. Palestinians view these laws as further alienation from their land, while Israeli representatives emphasize their scientific expertise. Foragers follows the journey of plants from the wild to the kitchen, capturing joy, knowledge, and resilience amidst prohibitive laws. The film questions the politics of extinction, pondering who decides what survives.
Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of architecture, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.
More infos: https://extracitykunsthal.be/en/events/foragers