Jumana Manna is a visual artist, filmmaker, and a visiting professor in the Harvard Art, Film, and Visual Studies Department in the Fall 2024. As I conducted this interview, I was a student in her class - Introduction to Time-Based Media. The obscurity that some might notice in the term “time-based media” speaks to the difficulty of defining Jumana’s practice through the already coined terms. As a maker without a strong commitment to one outlet myself, I was drawn to the multifaceted set of skills and modes of thinking that Jumana Manna reveals in her art.
Besides, the multiplicity of life forms and our hierarchical treatment of them has been startling for me lately. In Jumana’s work, I saw immediate and uncompromising respect for all life and a commitment to making space for it all. Of course, I wanted the work itself to be published in the issue, but, moreover, I was intrigued by the nature of the relationship between Jumana and her subjects. After class, I stayed a few times to talk to Jumana more and hoped that one of such conversations could become a brief glance into her practice for the readers as a cloud of thoughts to accompany her work.
In the Land Issue, The Harvard Advocate has the pleasure of publishing her work Old Bread International (2022).
VL: When talking about your work my instinct is to talk about land. I want to ask if I am misjudging it or imposing the issue’s theme?
JM: Not at all! A lot of my recent work has had to do with human-land relations and the transformations of land practices under duress. I have been interested in the question of preservation. That has been a big theme within the institutions of modernity (think museums), because modernity brought with it accelerated change and many erasures, particularly the erasure of life forms that were considered pre-modern and in need of “civilizing processes”; of course a racist ideological construct and byproduct of the enlightenment and European colonial conquests.
I have been looking at the contradictions within preservation practices: preservation of musical forms, seeds, plants, or other living and cultural forms. Very often, the same institutions that have come to “rescue”, archive, or preserve, belong to the same colonial structures that caused the eradication of these life forms to begin with. And so, in a way, my engagement with the land is also my engagement with archival practices, and the wider associations that come with the term “land”. Technologies of rule, that, on the one hand, come with an aspect of care—because preserving something is often an attempt to delay death—but on the other hand, are embedded in power relations. Every act of preservation entails an erasure of something else. These kinds of contradictions have been my entry point into the theme of “land”.
VL: You talked about archiving and preservation. There seems to be a chronological aspect to it: the conception of land in much of popular culture is associated with the archaic. Modernity seems to also be a pivotal point. How does the conception of land modify in modern times, and how would you envision it existing in the future? Where is it headed?
JM: This is a great point—it reminds me of an issue I thought about when I worked on colonial archives. They often had to do with histories of the city and urban relations that excluded the countryside. What was being prioritized and documented, and what you see in many state archives, had to do with taxation, legal issues, registrations and court decisions, notable figures—often associated with urbanity because it is there that power has situated itself. Land has not often been thought of as something that is archived, until the introduction of property, because it was framed as timeless. These are binaries and categories invented by modernity, understandings of linear time, and progress that frame culture as something that moves from its barbaric infancy towards civilization.
Land is associated with various things: it could be the soil, where you cultivate and grow food. It could be the place where you live, or which your community was expelled from by colonizers, it could be the strata of the earth that are suffering from the toxicity from nuclear tests or pesticides. Land as it relates to the commons and different kinds of nonproperty was framed as backwards, as something of the ‘past’ by capitalist modernity.
Until the advent of modernity, Palestinians, or Levantines, like much of the world, practiced a relationship to the land grounded in the belief that certain things should not be privatized and are common heritage, there to serve human survival through cooperation, social reproduction, and communal solidarity. The introduction of land as property, as a way to shape and control futures, brought about severe imbalances and miserable exclusions across the world. Notions such as land investment or land speculation often translate to dispossession.
How to resist the capitalist forces that have driven an extractivist and destructive relationship to land, or how something like soil erosion is tied to social justice, is what I have tried to unpack and understand through my work. We need land to live and to grow our food. We need land to maintain social bonds and cultivate our communities. Land is our past, present and future.
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, as an extreme case in point, causes not only immense human suffering, and the destruction of Palestinian culture, knowledge, heritage and memories but has inflicted severe and lasting damage on the land. The plants, the animals, the soil and the human beings who will survive, will be subject to slow violence, that is the hidden forms of violence resulting from the intensive bombing, such as cancer, toxic soil or polluted waterways for decades if not centuries to come. And yet Gazans keep saying, we want to go back to our land, even if it is a ruin. This ruin is ours and we will rebuild.
Land is at the center of all kinds of decolonial struggles. Past and present. What the colonizer seeks to do is to occupy that land and extract all it can from it, its resources and the colonized people’s labor. In the settler colonial context, the settler wants to naturalize their claim to the land while eradicating and replacing the native with the settler and his culture. This is also why I have been interested in the topic. I grew up in the settler colony that is called Israel, or what we still call Palestine.
VL: Tell me about the important points where your practice originated from.
JM: That has changed over the years. I have consistently been interested in liveliness: the liveliness of things, materials, plants and human lives, especially those that have been subject to pressure. I have been interested in the concept of ruination, which is just another word to think through slow violence or the aftermath of colonial violence. Ruination is the planetary condition of our epoch, affecting every material and immaterial aspect of life and land. It is also a site where life emerges because most people in the world grow up in places that have persisted through some form of brutality. How life continues within the ruins is a running thread throughout my practice. I am always searching for markers of life, joy or desire as signs of resistance and steadfastness.
Maybe you are also asking me about my identity as a Palestinian, and how central that is. Obviously it is central. Palestinians, like all people who come from racialized contexts and experience quite extreme forms of dehumanization, cannot ignore where they come from, because they are constantly being reminded of it.
There have been periods in my trajectory as an artist where I was not interested in fronting my identity as a Palestinian and wanted to explore issues of gender, sexuality and the body that were not confined by geographic specificity. I do not know if it is ever possible to work outside of a particular geography. But I wanted to foreground other themes, and because Palestine is so overpowering, there have been periods where I wanted to deal with issues or sites that are not, in any direct way Palestinian. In these cases, I did not necessarily address the fact that I am Palestinian in my bio or the project descriptions, as it did not seem relevant.
What I have been interested in, more than identity, is positionality: where one is speaking from, how and to whom? This is a crucial consideration for any artist making any kind of work. It is really only those who come from a hegemonic position that believe in such a thing as a neutral voice. We know that neutrality is a false construction of Whiteness. The intentionality of how I position myself in relation to the subjects that I work with is something I consider quite a lot. Sometimes finer aspects of that get answered in the process but I never pretend that positionality does not matter. Of course, today, when Palestinians are being subjected to genocide, I find it more important to foreground, in certain events or certain platforms, that I am Palestinian.
VL: How much agency do you think we have over our positionalities? Do you desire more agency, or are you at peace with it?
JM: My agency is first and foremost in the making of the work. How the work is received or engaged with? Not so much. That is not true actually, I do have agency there. For example, the way that I write about or communicate around a film or installation affects how it is received.
But of course, films and artwork will be understood and experienced by different audiences in different ways. And that is the beauty of art, and that is up for subjective interpretation. But when I deal with issues, where politics can be misread, I do care to be clear on where I stand, even if the work is open to multiple readings. I think there is a difference between the research that I do, the texts I write, and what the artworks do. It has always been important for me not to burden artworks with information as such, and to maintain the space of art or poetry as one of incompletion, contradiction, ambiguity.
Sometimes I construct a particular narrative around a film or sculpture series because that is what I am interested in at that moment. But then I look back at it five or ten years later, and I think, sure, it deals with those issues, but it does so many other things that I did not highlight when I first chose to talk about or write about the work. These things are also open to revision, rereading, and there is no one answer.
VL: I am lucky you talked about positionality, and your relationship to the subject. As someone who makes art, of course, I think about these things, aspiring to do justice. But as a viewer too, perhaps indulging in a search for moral judgments, I am looking for the artist to reveal their relationship with the subject. An inanimate thing can become a character but can remain an object, as well as an abstraction. In your work, there are so many different relationships with the land. There are foragers, and man-made objects that are part of the landscape, and there are imaginary landscapes. So, I am asking if you think there is a right and wrong kind of relationship to have with land.
JM: Interesting, I’ve never been asked about land in relation to moral judgment. I don’t often use terms such as right and wrong in my artwork. But I have used terms like extractive or sustainable, for example. There are certain relationships to land that are destructive. Chemicals that kill the soil and do not allow the soil to rejuvenate itself. Nuclear Waste kills everything that lives around it. The invention of property, turning land, or any other living being into property is a severe form of injustice that is deadly. If the land is related to as kin, something you care for, are a part of, that offers sustenance in turn. That’s a cyclical, life-giving, human-land relationship. These are the terms that I have thought through, more often than the terms right or wrong. But I do say it is wrong to occupy somebody else's land. That occupiers need to get out because land theft and dispossession are wrong and unjust.
VL: Do you have your own relationship with the subject that is independent of your artistic practice? Can you feel divorced from this role?
JM: I can say that I feel very connected to the Palestinian landscape because that is where I grew up. The plants and the smells and the kind of vegetation and animals – that is what is most familiar to me. I familiarize myself there more than in other places, and that gives me a sense of joy and belonging. I love foraging but have not cultivated as much. In general, I like plants a lot and enjoy being in what we call nature, or out on the land, regardless of the geography. ..
VL: A lot of what you do in your artistic practice, but also what you are talking about now, is offering attention and care for very small things. Seeds would be one example, but also the work that we are publishing, The Old Bread International—it pays attention to a thing that is discarded, and now, eternalized. That is the reason I am in love with the work. These small things—are they something that has to do with intimacy, or with another feeling that is important to you? Where is this attention and care coming from?
JM: I think intimacy is its keyword. That is a nice way to describe my work: finding intimacy in things that have been left behind. looking at the overlooked, like this book title of Norman Bryson that we read in class (note: the reference is to the book titled “Looking at the Overlooked”, chapter four –“Still Life and Feminine Space”). That is why I love that book because it offers a reflection on what has gone unnoticed and why, and what it means to look at discarded items, at what has been categorized as unimportant to History, the domestic space, the quotidian, the everyday. Art offers a way to spend time with oneself, with other people and things, whether that is a particular habit, a memory, a discarded bread or a leftover pipe. There is a form of intimacy and knowledge that you build in studying these things. As we do with one another. We learn more when we spend more time and approach our engagement with one another with intentionality. Through this intimacy, we are able to understand the world around us better or see things in a different light. It is a particular kind of care.
VL: Do you think the scale of your subject also shapes the scale of thinking or conversation about the work?
JM: I am interested in big and small things. Big topics and grand narratives and how they manifest in the small details of everyday life. I work sometimes with quite large sculptures, and then sometimes with very small sculptures, big collages and small collages. Shifting the scale of things—enlarging or shrinking—also shifts the way we see things, allowing us to look again or see differently.
VL: Finally, I wanted to ask you directly about the Old Bread International. What is the story of this particular intimate encounter?
JM: This installation mimics a common sight found in cities and towns across the Mediterranean: along ledges or beside trash bins, uneaten bread is laid out as an offering to be taken, consumed, or grow stale and rot. I started noticing this left-out bread as I went on walks around my neighborhood in East Jerusalem during the pandemic. I took an interest in the web of guilt and generosity that defines this practice, and how it is also a reflection of the excesses of urbanity, of overproduction. Bread is a signifier of life, and is therefore not to be wasted, not to be thrown in the trash. Acting from the religious beliefs that throwing out bread is haram or a sinful act, the leftover bread is often left outside and “gifted” to unknown receivers. Historically, old bread would have been given to the chickens or other livestock. Many today live in cities and don’t have animals to feed, so this strange phenomenon constitutes a kind of informal recycling. Related to my interest in land, I have been interested in decay as a part of life and its regeneration. In the biological world, rotting organisms feed other processes of regeneration. I spent a lot of time photographing and looking at the way bread goes stale, rots and decays to be able to reproduce these ceramic objects fossilized at various states of disintegration, and lingering between the freshly baked “sacred” bread and the abject version of its decay. It was a pleasurable act of mimesis, and perhaps a reflection of my interest in sites of decomposition that fall outside conventional historical interest and preservation.
2025