Jumana Manna's Wild Relatives: Syria's Slow Violence and Seed Extraction

In an essay for Afterall Journal 51, Edwin Nasr analyzes Jumana Manna's 2018 documentary 'Wild Relatives', which traces the relocation of ICARDA's seed bank from Aleppo to the Bekaa Valley during the Syrian war. The film connects the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway to the labor of Syrian refugee women reconstructing a seed collection. Nasr situates Manna's work within discourses of slow violence, extractivism, and planetary crisis, referencing theorists Rob Nixon, Macarena Gómez-Barris, and T.J. Demos. The essay contrasts Manna's film with earlier Syrian documentaries by Omar Amiralay, particularly 'A Flood in Baath Country' (2003), which critiqued the Assad regime's agricultural policies. Manna's practice, including her installation 'Post Herbarium' (2016), examines colonial preservation logics and the freezing of time. The essay argues that 'Wild Relatives' avoids political consensus, instead revealing how localized violence and global extraction converge.