In Vitro

My first encounter with Larissa Sansour’s work felt like being handed a world. The reminder that we too can speak in futures. That we also belong in the worlds of science fiction, in the realms of illusions, in the endless and boundless lands of the unknown and the imagined. We are not just catastrophe. We are not just memory. In In Vitro, Sansour grapples with these questions of what is collective, what is nostalgia, what can be futures and how is it all framed. Placing the present into floating time, allowing for a sense of pause where questions can be asked, “maintaining chronology” can be eternally explored. In Vitro is a way to reaffirm that our futures are limitless, that our places, our memories, our shared existences do not revolve in the vicious circle that colonial powers and histories continue to attempt to maintain us in. Sansour’s work propels you into time, combining past, present and future, and inviting you to dialogue, to dream, to remember, to perceive and to imagine the sounds, the soil, the plants, the wind, the place. Listen to the archive. And remember there are infinite ways to tell our stories and to envision where they go.

Nada El-Omari
Filmmaker and writer