Cross-breeding chickpea varieties at ICARDA, Lebanon.  Still from Wild Relatives (2018). Courtesy of the artist. Audio recording of wind blowing through a field by Jandre160108.

Manna is interested in the power dynamics surrounding the processes through which history is constructed and consumed, and therefore her concerns and methods are necessarily archival, often engaging with and interrogating the acts of collecting and classification.  Examining the documents, materials, and structures that together form the substrate over which these processes are enacted, she reanimates these histories through the use of metaphor, gesture, and form, often invoking human and plant bodies.  This article will focus on three works that deal with three different archives: a seed vault used to repopulate the collection of an agricultural research station that is forced to leave Syria as a result of the Syrian War; the herbarium of an American botanist and missionary working in Syria (now including Lebanon) in the late nineteenth century; and the recordings of a German ethnomusicologist who collected Palestinian vernacular music in the 1930s, while attempting to establish an archive and department of Oriental Music at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

Manna's work may be described as parenthetical in its focus and methods, in that it captures the conversations, small and large moments, digressions, allusions, and fragments that together create the substance of life, which often lies dormant within official histories.  In the spirit of this process, what follows is a meandering exploration of her work that is  interspersed with characters from different archives and with my own personal and professional reflections as an archivist.

Wild Relatives

One of Manna’s more recent projects, Wild Relatives (2018) is one in a suite of works centered on seed saving, agriculture, and plant taxonomy.  The film investigates the geopolitics of seed cultivation and preservation as they unfold during the forced relocation of an agricultural research station from Syria to Lebanon as a consequence of the Syrian War.  The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) is one node within a network of gene banks and agricultural research centers spread mainly over the Global South. It was first established in Lebanon in 1976 and relocated to Syria a year later, following the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War.  By the time of Manna’s filming in 2015, it has returned to its original location in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, leaving behind its collection of 140,000 regional seed samples. Wild Relatives follows ICARDA as it begins the process of rebuilding its collection by withdrawing from the cache of duplicates that it has deposited at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a seed bank housed on a remote Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Echoing the annual life cycle of domesticated grains, Wild Relatives spends twelve months following the various lives bound within this exchange of seeds between Norway and Lebanon.  

Originating at the site of a former coal mine and funded through a mix of government subsidies and corporate donations, the Svalbard seed vault promotes itself as “a long-term seed storage facility, built to stand the test of time and the challenge of natural or man-made disasters.”  ICARDA’s request represents the first withdrawal by an agricultural center of its duplicate seeds, and the film examines the media attention surrounding this event and, by extension, the ‘man-made disaster’ that has activated the Svalbard vault in fulfilling its stated purpose. Outside the scope of this attention, however, this disaster has extended other tendrils that complicate this narrative, prompting more intimate explorations.  Surrounding this movement of seeds between institutions is a macrocosm of other migrations and lives in flux. Among these are Youssef, a Lebanese farmer who now rents his land to Syrian refugees and who ferries both people and seeds to and from ICARDA; Walid, a Syrian refugee and organic farmer working in the Bekaa Valley who creates an open access seed library; and the Syrian women, refugees housed by the UN Human Rights Council, who tend the crops in ICARDA’s fields. 

The titular ‘wild relatives’ of Manna’s film are the wild or untended genetic relatives of the domesticated plants, or cultivars, of human agriculture.  These unruly cousins continue to evolve within their natural environments, acquiring characteristics, such as drought tolerance and disease resistance, that are uniquely suited and developed in relation to their surroundings.  In their critical relationship to biodiversity, they emerge as protagonists against the homogenizing and extractive forces of modern industrial agriculture, whether it be selective breeding and genetic modification into high-yield crop monocultures, the use of agrochemicals, or the patenting and subsequent ‘ownership’ of biological information, such as that contained within seeds.  Both ICARDA and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are implicated within this scheme through their funding sources (the Svalbard vault counts DuPont, Unilever, and Bayer/Monsanto among its donors) and ties to the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an international network of centers established and heavily funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, which was in many respects responsible for developing and exporting this model worldwide. 

In this sense, wild relatives also become a potent metaphor for the processes and people—the small farmers, scientists, field workers,  drivers, and poets—that both enable and are juxtaposed against this institutional transaction.  Within the context of agriculture, the archival quality of a seed moves beyond its function as a repository of genetic information, encompassing a series of physical, cultural, and historical relationships.  Thus the efforts of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, with its vacuum-packed and cryogenically preserved seed ‘accessions’ housed under a layer of Arctic permafrost, are thrown into relief against a wider landscape of living relationships with the earth.

Post Herbarium / Ways of Seeing

These themes are addressed in Post Herbarium (2016), where Manna explores the work of American missionary and botanist George E. Post (1838-1909), who “along with scores of European and American scholars travelled to the Levant with the belief that scientific study of the so called Bible Land would unlock Christian theology" (Manna, Post Herbarium). Post gathered 20,000 plant specimens belonging to 177 families and 955 genera of flowering plants and ferns of Lebanon and its adjacent regions, which are now housed at the namesake Post Herbarium at the American University of Beirut.  In this installation, woodprint cutouts of the flora that comprise Post’s archives are arranged around a hollow bust of the botanist, in which flowers have been placed. Nearby, a series of presses bound with ratchet ties recall the process through which living flora were transformed into dry plant pressings and entered into the archive.  A framed collage, titled A Biblical Landscape, depicts a landscape assembled from cut-outs of nature images found on the labels of cleaning products.  This work seems to be the most explicit in its commentary, reflecting the image created by Post’s investigations.  A ‘pure’ or ‘clean’ scientific view turns antiseptic, producing a composite of artificial parts.

Post Herbarium, 2016. Installation shots from Liverpool Biennale 2016 (photo: Richard Ivey).  Courtesy of the artist.

Post Herbarium is concerned with classification and the ability of scientific performance to impart a rational veneer onto deeply subjective concerns.  Post's travels and research are representative of a larger wave of European and American interest in the Levant in the later nineteenth century, which saw an increase in scientific and religious missions and a boom in 'Holy Land' tourism, as methods of transportation improved enough to accommodate leisure travel on a larger scale.  At the same time, the development and popularization of photography, which was intimately bound with the region from its beginnings, created a market for travel photographs and souvenir postcards of these locales.  As a consequence, the taxonomic impulse that motivated Post's work was applied to another realm in the Levant: the classification of its inhabitants into types. Where visitors and locals interacted, these photographs often reflected a mix of these ethnographic and religious perspectives.  The given names of the people in these images are rarely recorded; rather, they are cataloged according to their ethnic group or occupation.  Instead of conveying a sense of interiority or connection, these kinds of images have a further distancing effect.  Like the meticulously pressed flowers of Post’s herbarium, their human subjects undergo a flattening effect under the weight of this gaze.  As the Levant became one of the most photographed places on Earth, an economy of manufactured images arose that served this desire for mediated seeing.

One of these visitors was American photographer Adelbert Bartlett (1887-1966), whose archival collection at UCLA holds a trove of images of Syria (then including Lebanon), Palestine, Egypt, and the Anatolian peninsula from the early twentieth century.  Bartlett's connection to the Levant was a result of his work and travels as the director of the Near East Relief news bureau in Los Angeles. The Near East Relief, now the Near East Foundation (NEF), is one of the oldest humanitarian and development organizations in the United States, chartered by an act of Congress in 1919 in response to the Armenian and Assyrian genocides in the Ottoman Empire. In an interesting connection to Manna's work, the NEF has, since the 1960s and 70s, been heavily invested in agricultural research and development in the Global South, becoming a granting agency to both ICARDA and the American University of Beirut, as well as the Desert Development Center in Cairo, Egypt.

Bartlett worked as a publicist for the NER and therefore, though that role might not have guided his entire output, it is appropriate to assume that many of the photographs he produced were informed by those concerns.  A close look at some of these images reveals a visual vocabulary of omissions and subversions that belies their apparent documentary nature: signs of a studio backdrop, non-native people in native dress, individuals with titles or descriptions that change between images, and physical interventions, such as superimposed or composite images, that result in invented scenes.  The subtext of such images transforms the act of looking at them into an interpretive exercise. 

It was among the meticulously numbered prints and negatives in this collection that I unearthed an unexpected correspondence between Bartlett and Palestinian photographer Karimeh Abbud (1896-1955).  Abbud’s presence among the materials is not indicated in the catalog record or collection finding aid, and her images are intermixed with Bartlett’s and are numbered according to his own system, inviting questions about their use.  This exchange between the American and Palestinian photographers can be probed on many levels. Beyond questions of extraction and erasure, it complicates any presumptions of homogeneity within Palestinian society and exposes the intersecting dynamics between the photographers and their subjects.

“Miss Karimeh Abbud,” as her photographer’s stamp indicates, is often given a place of distinction as the first professional Arab woman photographer.  In addition to her work as a wedding and studio photographer, she was also active in the production of postcards, photographing historic sites and monuments, natural scenes, and the inhabitants of Nazareth and Bethlehem, where she lived and worked.  As the daughter of a prominent family who received her first camera at the age of seventeen, Abbud's body of work reflects the nuances of her social position.  Her studio and wedding portraits, produced for the private consumption of a largely middle-class clientele, reflect the personalities and aspirations of their sitters. By contrast, her images of peasants and workers are more anonymized and appear to have circulated through postcards as a form of currency.  In her photographs of peasants (above) the roles of her subjects are etched into the image area of the photograph.  They are then repeated on the back in Bartlett’s handwriting, representing their transmission and solidification within Bartlett's schema.  These exchanges are unpredictable, however, and at times the gaze turns back on Abbud.  On the back of a photograph addressed to Bartlett, for example, Abbud has meticulously rendered the content of the image, a group portrait of herself and the teachers and students of the German school in Bethlehem.  It is interesting to contrast her lengthy description with the two words jotted by Bartlett at the top corner, for purposes of classification: “Arab Children.”

We can recognize Abbud as a complicated individual who mobilized her talents and connections to penetrate the male-dominated world of Levantine photography.  As a photographer whose life was intertwined with those of many of her subjects, she produced images that provide a valuable view of the rich cultural life of Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century.  Nor does it seem appropriate to dismiss Bartlett's photography entirely as an Orientalist machination.  The textures of their work, as well as of the relationship between the two photographers, reflect the particulars of place, self, and desire that together created their understandings of the world within and around them.  Ultimately, they are both part of the complex web of human relationships of which the archival record is comprised.

A Magical Substance Flows Into Me

A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (2016) begins with a similar act of looking.  We follow Manna to the National Library of Israel, where she looks through the archival collection of ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann, a German-Jewish émigré who in the late 1930s made a series of recordings of Palestinian and Mizrahi Jewish vernacular music for his English-language radio program for the Palestine Broadcasting Service.  The camera rests on Manna's hands as she sifts through Lachmann's photographs and papers, and we hear her voice as she reads from the pages of his writing:

There are Arabs, especially among the educated classes, who consider themselves reformers.  They think that times have changed, and they want a new kind of music. But I believe that, no, instead of the real thing, we obtain a hybrid production, typical of neither East nor West, and shallow like ditch water.  We should instead encourage pure and unspoiled genuine local music.

Lachmann, for whom this 'new kind of [Arab] music' represents an uncomprehending mimicry of European styles, is not interested in the ability of these performers to innovate and evolve.  For him, instead, the value of their music derives from its fixed and 'pure', or essentially separate, nature.  Like the frozen seeds of the Svalbard vault or the dried and pressed flowers of Post's herbarium, this emphasis frames these musical traditions in a state of arrested development, separated from their living contexts.  This fixity, or freezing, facilitates their absorption into a worldview of Lachmann's creation, one saturated with condescending and, as we later learn, incorrect assumptions.

This visit configures the structure and thematic concerns of the film.  In the time that follows, Manna recreates Lachmann's efforts, responding to his priorities as a recorder and collector.  She revisits the communities recorded in seven of Lachmmann's twelve radio programs—Bedouin and Palestinian Arabs; Samaritans; Kurdish, Moroccan, and Yemenite Jews—and asks their members to perform again, this time in their own homes and places of work or worship.  The performers cook, drink, talk about work and family; their performances are sometimes interrupted by their spouses and children.  They listen to Lachmann's original recordings, which Manna plays for them on her smartphone, and offer their commentary, both enriching and correcting the record.  In short, they exist within their living worlds, inhabited by memory and feeling and the small concerns of everyday life.  Through careful observation and subtle humor, Manna teases open the cracks in these historical recordings to reanimate the living relationships that have been subsumed within.  Additionally, Manna blurs the boundaries between the observer and the observed, in contravention of Lachmann's methods and claims.  She inserts scenes of herself and her family, who live in Jerusalem, into the film, positioning herself as an actor within this network of traditions.

Throughout the film, the kitchen serves as an important site of shared memory and contextualization. Manna lingers there as the spouses and partners of the performers—primarily women—prepare food and in particular coffee, a requisite for visits from guests.  Their voices support, expand, and at times contest the narratives of the performers, as when Im Wasif, the wife of Samaritan cleric Abdullah Wasif Cahen, effectively derails her husband's veneration as they listen to Lachmann's recording of a recitation by her absentee father.  These kitchen scenes provide a further layer of intimacy and document a parallel cultural performance; that of preparing, consuming, and sharing meals.  I am reminded again of the za'atar in my own kitchen, indicative as it is of my family's foodways and shared traditions.

The final performance of the film is a Palestinian wedding song.  We watch two musicians, Osama Abu'Ali and Hani Shushari, perform a recitation through voice and a yarghul, a traditional double-pipe woodwind instrument.  Suddenly the sound of a synthesizer enters the song and the camera pans out to reveal a third member of the ensemble, Hussein Abu'Ali, playing a Korg keyboard.  In a final response to Lachmann, bookending the film, the musicians play their new fusion— in demand, as Osama's wife tells us, at weddings all over the West Bank and Galilee.  As they perform, Osama's father, Hassan, enters the scene and begins to perform the motions of a dabke, or traditional dance.  The final shots of the film belong to him and are suffused by his sense of life and pleasure as, smiling and singing, he dances towards the screen.

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