On Sunday, June 20, the summer solstice, we will project Jumana Manna’s film Wild Relatives (64 minutes, 2018) on the Belkin’s Outdoor Screen five times from morning until sundown, in a conversation across media with Holly Schmidt’s Fireweed Fields. In recent months, the strange, spasmodic course of space and time has been mitigated by little other than the changes in seasons, the rhythms of nature and the communal spaces offered by the outdoors. Seasonal and celestial markers such as that of the solstice bring this collective orientation upward and outward into marked relief.

Of the film, Manna writes:

Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: in 2012 an international agricultural research centre was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. It captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young migrant women. The meditative pace patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds.¹

In Fireweed Fields, part of Schmidt’s multi-year Vegetal Encounters residency at UBC, fireweed becomes a living metaphor for healing and resurgence following a crisis through its capacity to blanket a disturbed landscape with its blooms. A counterpoint to the turf-grass monoculture of manicured lawns, Fireweed Fields uses a succession model of planting in the hope that a meadow mix of fireweed, lupins, Idaho fescue and yarrow will lay a foundation for continued growth. These meadows will attract various species of shrubs, grasses, birds, insects, and small mammals. Schmidt’s approach to crisis is distinctly gentle. She emphasizes community, interdisciplinary conversation, and a slow, contemplative engagement with nature – and one another – as a balm for pain and a catalyst for transformative growth.

Manna’s work situates seed banks as modernist projects, in that a contradictory ethos of preservation and erasure defines their modes of operation. She traces the roots of this mentality in relation to plant taxonomy to the imperial practice of establishing botanical gardens and herbariums.² The banks, dedicated to the preservation and circulation of enhanced seeds, function at the expense of landraces and the “wild relatives” from which landraces develop.³ She also reflects on the practical and conceptual affinities between seed banks and archives. The implications of “freezing” seeds – literally and metaphorically – in seed banks function in contrast to the practice of “living” seed libraries. One such library is that operated by Walid, a Syrian refugee living in the Bekaa Valley, whose work Manna follows in the film. His project hinges on the amplification of landrace varieties, and seeds are available to anyone who wants to use them in organic farming.⁴

Questions surrounding biodiversity, relationality and the inextricable binding up of social and environmental crises with capitalist and imperial power structures permeate both Wild Relatives and Fireweed Fields. The colonial and classist histories surrounding gardens and lawns, and their cultivation specifically for consumption by wealthy landowners or as forms of imperial domination, have been widely discussed in scholarship surrounding ecology and power.⁵ The continued complicity of these power structures in perpetuating and exploiting current political, environmental and medical crises locates Fireweed Fields in this politically charged space. 

Seeds are described by one scholar as a “biosocial archive,” in that they chronicle their own evolution, utility and movement within themselves.⁶ Fireweed chronicles its own origins in burned or otherwise disturbed land, and the plants and animals who return to these restored environments indicate phases of growth and renewal. In Vegetal Encounters, institutional markers of time give way to seasonal milestones such as that of seed germination, priming us to learn from plant life, their cycles and their interconnectivity.

Image: video still, Wild Relatives, Jumana Manna, 2018. Photo: Marte Vold