This set of foraging walks, food, herb and seed shares and curated film screenings was put together by collaborating artists Nicole Sarmiento, Ismail Farouk and Yasmin Meyer.
In ‘Archives of the Botanical’ you were invited to a day of film screenings, walks and seed/herb shares for Palestine. Alongside the work of visual artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna, and the film of scholar, author, filmmaker collaborators Heidi Grunebaum and Mark Kaplan, we invite a multisensorial engagement with land, seeds, herbs, botanical archives and food, channeling solidarity with the ongoing struggle of Palestinians and marking the historic case of South Africa v. Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
This set of screenings and embodied interventions approaches questions of land, memory, ruins and fugitivity alongside botanical archives. Exploring plant/human intimacy, legal/scientific regimes of occupation in Palestine/Israel and the stories that plants tell, these works offer memory, knowledge, caretaking and refusal in the context of ongoing occupation and capitalist relations of extraction.
Foragers (2022) by Jumana Manna
Foragers 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 Village Under the Forest (2013) by Mark J. Kaplan and Heidi Grunebaum
The Village Under The Forest explores the hidden remains of the destroyed Palestinian village of Lubya, which lies under a purposefully cultivated forest plantation called South Africa Forest. The Village Under The Forest unfolds as a personal meditation from the Jewish Diaspora.
Using the forest and the village ruins as metaphors, the documentary explores themes related to the erasure and persistence of memory and dares to imagine a future in which dignity, acknowledgement and co-habitation become shared possibilities in Israel/Palestine. The Village Under The Forest won the Audience Award at Encounters South African International Documentary Festival in 2013