Organic futurism: sedimented pasts, speculative futures in the shadow of catastrophe

This essay begins by exploring the collaborative art installation, ‘Sediments,’ by a Palestinian citizen of Israel and two Jewish Israelis, Nawal Arafat, Maayan Tsadka and Leoni Schein, shown in Haifa between November 2022 and April 2023. The installation is then juxtaposed with the futuristic short movie In Vitro (2019) by diasporic Palestinian filmmaker Larissa Sansour, co-produced with Søren Lind. How, we ask, do these two interventions connect visual articulations of political violence and territorial dispossession to socio-natures that extend beyond the human–the deep time of the sediment; the power of the heirloom seed; the archaic logic of the DNA strand? We propose the notion of ‘organic futurism,’ that is to say the deliberate yoking of cultivation with (or within) works of expressive culture to imaginings of the future, in order to demonstrate how ‘Sediments’ and In Vitro extend beyond representations of catastrophe to imagine new forms of resilience that emerge from the very ground on which we stand.