Our third film program focused on the thematic of sustainability featuring the documentary film

Sowing the Seeds for the Future
by Dominique Koch

It was available here from October 24 - 31, 2021
with an audio interview with the artist

ICARDA (International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas) owns one of the world’s largest collections of old or wild seed varieties, which it continuously plants and archives. Established in Lebanon, in 1977 ICARDA had to flee the civil war there to Syria. Now, because of the current conflict in Syria, it has had to flee back to Lebanon.

In 2011/12, various employees were involved in the exfiltration of seeds from the war zone in Syria under the most difficult and dangerous conditions in order to secure the remaining stocks in new centres in Lebanon and Morocco. In the face of apocalyptic scenarios of world events, rising global temperatures, water shortages and new pathogens their archive and work help to guarantee the genetic diversity of plants as well as the nutrition of mankind. Their wild seed varieties become important building blocks for science to rediscover and apply the characteristics and survival skills they have acquired over thousands of years. 

In Sowing the Seeds for the Future the images from the research institute are interwoven with a conversation with the natural philosopher Andreas Weber, who deals with the idea of unconditional reciprocity and paraphrases this with the concept of “edibility”. In addition, another fictional voice conveys the perspective of the stored seeds.

Thus, in this video project, the narrative modes mix and merge, culminating in a kind of “science-fictional poetry”. For science fiction is the place where the boundaries between fiction and political and scientific reality are blurred and new worlds can be experimented with.

CREDITS:
Director, camera, editing: Dominique Koch
Collaborators: Andreas Weber, Mahmoud Solh, Mariana Yasbek and Ali Shehadeh. Featured in conversations.
Sound design & music: Tobias Koch.
Voice-over: Stephanie Németh-Parker
Nanoflights, scientific images: Stefan Diller, Scientific Photography Wuerzburg. Scanned on TESCAN MIRA3.

Supported by: Pro Helvetia, Fachausschuss Film und Medienkunst BS/BL, Volkart Stiftung, Erna & Curt Burgauer Stiftung

Dominique Koch (*1983) lives and works in Basel and Paris. From 2004 until 2011 she studied photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. She understands her installations as “thinking laboratories” that merge different fields of research resulting in hybrid entanglements and unlikely intellectual encounters. Recent solo exhibitions include Holobiont Society at CAN, Centre d’art Neuchâtel, Maybe We Should Rejuvenate the Words rather than the Bodies at Rinomina in Paris and Beyond Chattering and Noise at Centre Culturel Suisse Paris. Her works won several awards and were presented in various group exhibitions at, among others, CCCB Barcelona, STATE Studio Berlin, Shedhalle Zürich, Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Lagos Biennial II, A Tale of a Tub Rotterdam, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Swissnex San Francisco, Kunsthalle Basel, EKKM Tallinn, Copenhagen Contemporary, and Kunsthalle Mainz. 

WF Online series included four curated screening programs each giving a curatorial focus featuring Basel, Swiss and/or international productions. Each program was available for one week, accompanied when possible with interviews with the filmmakers.

February 2021 (17 - 24): Indigenous Peoples
May 2021 (12 - 19): Touching Realities
October 2021 (24 - 31): Sustainability
December 2021 (14 - 21): Video essays


This project was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Mary & Ewald E. Bertschmann-Stiftung and the Division of Cultural Affairs Basel-Stadt.