Larissa Sonsour’s In Vitro, 2019: A portrait of a post-apocalyptic world
Larissa Sonsour & Søren Lind, In Vitro (Film Still) (2019), Spike Island.
Larissa Sonsour & Søren Lind, In Vitro (Installation view), 2 channel black and white film, 27 minutes and 44 seconds ,2019. Photo by Ugo Carmeni. https://www.labiennale.org/.
Contemporary culture is flying at light speed, away from all that’s familiar, barreling towards the unknown. Danish-Palestinian artist Larissa Sonsour seizes this uncertainty and illustrates a radical post-apocalyptic future. Sonsour’s In Vitro, 2019 is a fearless yet polished portrait of the planet in the throes of the deeply affecting uncertainty of looming catastrophe under humanity’s self-destruction. Sonsour constructs the entirety of a new world; cement, underground, monochrome. Further, Sonsour’s work questions the difference in priorities between generations and demonstrates the tension that arises when creation is no longer interested in its creator.
Larissa Sonsour’s In Vitro, 2019 is a 28-minute, two channel Arabic Sci-fi film, filmed in a monochrome black and white. In Vitro opens to an intimate dialogue on collective identity, and memory, between a woman on her death bed and a young clone destined to preserve the future after an ecological disaster has driven them to live underground. In Vitro, is certainly reflective of current issues around contested geographies and the political situation in Palestine, as the film features the internationally-renowned Palestinian actors Hiam Abbass and Maisa Abd Elhadi and was filmed partially in Bethlehem. However, it is equally reflective of a global scale, where Earth becomes the contested geography between humans and the natural world. The film is set in a stark, lifeless, abandoned nuclear plant, and in the hospital ward we witness a conversation between the elderly and ailing Dulia, and the young, agitated Alia. Dulia has lived “in the old world” and through flashbacks we see Dulia running through the streets of a washed-out city of Bethlehem, desperately outrunning the flood of an oil slick. Days before this apocalypse, Dulia collected heirloom seeds in intention to replant the future. These heirloom seeds are symbolic of the fragility of the present, and the question of the environment’s ability to survive current processes of climate breakdown and ecological collapse, that often result from warfare and profitable exploitations in contested geographies. In a very Utopian sense, the film provides an end all answer, the seeds will save the future.
The film also reveals generational differences and shifting priorities. Alia is a clone of Dulia’s daughter and has been engineered underground and destined to rebuild her “home”, a town she remembers but has never seen. Alia wrestles with why she was implanted with memories, claiming that the memories are distressing, and she doesn’t “believe in ghosts”. This is also an interesting allusion towards cultural homogenization and the negotiation of identity markers, and how crucial a sense of identity is towards imagining one’s place in the future. Dulia alternatively, clings to her memories, and expresses her belief that the future seems dissociative to the contemporary experience, stating that “the past is still there, as intact as ever”. The generational differences and their opposing perspectives build on the film’s theme of dichotomies and dualities; two screens, two people, black and white, destruction and creation, past and future.
Most interestingly the film explores the place of memory and heritage, their place in building the future. Alia states that the past is meaningless towards building the future, and Dulia responses that the past is ever present, it can never really leave. Because Alia is a clone, we are driven to question what the importance of heritage to creation is, when the creator has been destroyed in the course of progress. Sonsour’s work visualizes the achingly contemporary concern of what it means to humanity when we destroy the natural world from which we evolved.
Bibliography
1. Danish Arts Foundation. “Danish Pavilion.” Home. Accessed July 4th, 2019. https://www.danishpavilion.org/.
2. E-Flux. “Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.” Announcements. April 3, 2019.
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/254040/larissa-sansourheirloom/.
3. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the future: the desire called utopia and other science fictions. London: Verso.
4. Sonsour, Larissa. “In Vitro (2019).” Projects. Accessed May 25, 2019. https://www.larissasansour.com/In%20Vitro.html