When: Sunday 19 May, 3–5pm
Where: Gallery 1
Booking: Free, booking essential. Please book here.
Join us for a community screening of Foragers by Jumana Manna, as part of Nourishment: A Cyclical Programme at Primary.
Foragers (2022) depicts the dramas around the practice 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 employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme) and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further alienates them from their land while Israeli state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.
The screening will be followed by a response and Q&A with artist, educator and architect Dima Srouji.
This event is a collaboration between Primary and Nottingham Contemporary, building on the collaborative programme Sustaining Resilience (2023) and is part of the spring Nourishment season at Primary.
Access: This event will take place in Gallery 1 which has level access from our main entrance. The film will be shown with subtitles in English. Please email admin@weareprimary.org or call 0115 924 4493 regarding access enquiries.
Please read Primary’s Safer Spaces Policy here.
Foragers ( 2022) film still, Jumana Manna
Bios:
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.
Dima Srouji is an architect and visual artist exploring the ground as a deep space of rich cultural weight and a space for potential collective repair. Srouji looks for ruptures in the ground where imaginary liberation is possible. She works with glass, text, archives, maps, plaster casts, and film, understanding each as an evocative object and emotional companion that help her question what cultural heritage and public space mean in the context of the Middle East, especially in Palestine. Her projects are developed closely with archaeologists, anthropologists, sound designers, and glassblowers. She was the Jameel Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2022-2023 and is currently leading studio Underground Palestine in MA City Design at the Royal College of Art in London.