Larissa Sansour: Heirloom
Exploring memory and identity through science fiction at the Venice Biennale
Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. In Vitro (2019) 2 channel black and white film. 27 mins 44 secs. Courtesy of the artists.
With text by Janet Bellotto, artist, educator and writer.
“Entire nations are built on fairytales,” states the character Dunia, responding to Alia in a conversation about memory and the past in Larissa Sansour’s In Vitro. This two-channel film is part of her presentation Heirloom for the Danish Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Nat Muller.
Heirloom also includes the mixed media installation with soundscape Monument for Lost Time, which is encountered in a room across from the film projection. The enormous sculpture of an ominous black sphere, with surround synthesized sound, dwarfs the visitors to the pavilion and reflects back to images seen in the film—science fiction infiltrating the real. However, it is the narrative of this world underground that explores nostalgic memories and hope of a future rebuilt.
The black and white film opens with a wave of black oil rushing through the streets of Bethlehem. It encapsulates a sensation of destruction of all the blood lost and memories washed away. Along with transitions between archival footage and the narrative past of the character Dunia, we cannot forget the events of Bethlehem’s complex and turbulent history. The story is set after an ecological disaster of Bethlehem and life living underground—embedding its metaphor for a life suppressed but safeguarded from threat, while the Palestinian city can be reconstructed or restored. We see an orchard being replanted, cloning from the seeds that remained.
The film’s title clues the viewer that the character has been made, and in fact a clone from remaining DNA after the disaster. Alia, the young clone of the scientist Dunia, argues with her about the lived and recollected experience. Dunia lays in her death bed dreaming to return to a past or her home rebuilt. We experience memories that Dunia clings to along with those that are collective and archived through the cloned existence of Alia. As a clone, memories have been implanted, and Alia carries the experience of others of a place bygone. As a new place rebuilds, Alia has a strong will for her own identity and experiences rather than the ones she inherited.
The question of memory is brought to task and questions the necessity and the impact of nostalgia. Where does an individual’s memory begin and when is it reinvented by the stories of others? Dunia argues how “We were all raised on someone else’s nostalgia.” Yet Alia states, “The problem with nostalgia is that it keeps you entertained...” and continues “...while everything you cherish washes away.” Deafened by the past and questioning the building of the future, inherited trauma, along with the role that memories play, weave throughout the scenes. As time navigates from past to future in the film, charged with ownership, heritage, as well as exile, it raises questions: whether the erasure of memory and the neglecting of clinging to nostalgia would be better for the future, or whether memories are necessary to avoid future mistakes and the construction of a new identity.
Heirloom, and in particular In Vitro, provides no immediate consolation for the future in face of disaster, but hovers the notions of memory both its potential prospect and hinderance for new beginnings.