On the other hand, Wild Relatives (64min, 2018), reflects on the management of preservation and its regulation on a global scale. Once again, from a botanical perspective, plants and seeds question contemporary ideas of territory, access to resources and borders. Based on three case studies of comparative cases between Middle East and Northern Europe, the artist travels to different seed banks and regions to reveal the institutional politics and protocols behind the origin and maintenance of the seed banks. The film also makes visible the cultural ties that exist within each bank, their geopolitical principles and the relationship between culture and nature in each context. In the case of Syria and Lebanon, this process is traversed by agricultural policies as methods of population control in the region, and, in a latter stage, the impact of wars, firstly in Lebanon and recently in Syria. Originally established in Lebanon, in 1977 the International Center for Agricultural Reasearach in Dry Areas (IRCADIA) was given a land in Tel Hada, south of Aleppo, direct consequence of the civil war in Lebanon. Years letter, the bank moved to Lebanon preserving the categories of local species that are disappearing due to monocultures and successive wars. The Norwegian seed bank in Svalbard exceeds regional approaches to control plantations and plant spices overseas. Using the most advanced technologies for the conservation of biological matter, the Global Seed Vault carries out a worldwide collection under the pretext of preserving and giving continuity to all vegetal species of the planet and to guarantee human survival in the face of an apocalyptic future. Lastly, A Magical Substance Flows into Me (66 min, 2016) portrays the sounds of the Levantine coast transcending rituals and borders, questioning notions of origin and the cultural identification of populations on both sides of the sea, as well as the political and religious regimes installed in the Palestinian territory.

The link between her audiovisual and sculpture work concretizes a material fixation of the gestures that Manna collects with her gaze. Cache Series is an ongoing collection of ceramic sculptures inspired by khabyas, traditional food storage devices found in houses in the Levantine area. Other times, her sculptures resemble elements of the transport of goods, such as pipes, or capture the idiosyncrasy of a daily act. These morphologies start from a gesture of identity then drift towards the sculptural, thus capturing an image that describes the singularity of a place and its culture. Manna’s work, with its cinematographic and sculptural languages, generates a living archive of customs and rituals, of smells and flavors, which makes us question whether the preservation of material and non-material legacies is an act that must be orchestrated globally or instead is an immanent condition that transcends the temporality and political dictates of territories. Her fierce desire to capture these frugal elements and its hidden politics helps to make visible the empowerment of the protagonists in each story. Barbarians, in the words of Louisa Yousfi, reverse the given structures of the politics always finding ways to take care of what is common and mundane and to make it their own, resisting cultural theft with the dignity of the ritual but without underestimating the implacable erosion of the forces of dispossession. As Yousfi says, the barbarian embodies pure otherness, a figure that is both poetic and unsettling. The barbarian proposes another way of inhabiting humanity, constantly escaping from what is already established. Manna opens the door to other worlds that are sometimes invisible but resist and, thus, her cinematographic and sculptural work creates a legacy of unsung stories.