In this short video excerpt from her talk, Palestinian artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna talks about the ‘unruly force’ that resists destruction, erasure, and ruination.
Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her interdisciplinary practice focuses on infrastructures, body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. She was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.
In her talk, Jumana Manna spoke about her dual practice as a sculptor and a filmmaker, and her ongoing inquiries into the contradictions of preservation and ruination. Manna focused on her recent film, Foragers, which depicts the criminalization of Palestinian plant foraging traditions. The film challenges the logic of extinction debates under settler-colonial and neoliberal regimes, namely the hierarchies of who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on. Manna’s talk looked at how art forms partake in the refusal of attempted erasures, and can instead re-ground and recode meaning and matter.
Jumana Manna’s talk is part of CHRA’s ongoing Talks on Human Rights and the Arts series. Each year, CHRA hosts public talks by inspiring artists and activists around the world, and then shares their texts in a published volume.