Public Screening and Discussion with curator Zofia Cielatkowska

Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen

October 4, 6-7.30pm

Zofia Cielatkowska has selected Jumana Manna’s film Wild Relatives (2018) to screen at Peacock. Wild Relatives explores the recreation of a seed bank from Aleppo, Syria to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war. Having left behind its seed bank, the research centre began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from back-ups stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, Wild Relatives captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley, carried out primarily by young migrant women. The meditative pace of the scenes are a succession of processes, partially-scripted dialogues, and observations that tease out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Zofia Cielatkowska about postcolonial ecologies.