Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind:
In Vitro and Familiar Phantoms
Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind:
In Vitro and Familiar Phantoms
This special programme at M+ Cinema presents two key short films from Sansour and Lind’s oeuvre. Throughout their collaboration, the duo’s cinematic language uncovers the inner workings of memory, narrative, heritage, loss and inherited trauma and insists that space is never neutral. In Vitro (2019), commissioned by the Danish Arts Foundation for the 58th Venice Biennale, is a black-and-white sci-fi film set after global ecological collapse, in which scientists convert an abandoned nuclear reactor beneath Bethlehem into an orchard to cultivate native Palestinian plants grown from heirloom seeds preserved before the apocalypse. Familiar Phantoms (2023) is an experimental documentary about memory, history, and trauma, weaving together live-action, Super 8 footage, archival photographs and personal mementos together to examine how fiction and anecdotes shape and alter memory in the search for meaning.
Søren Lind, Larissa Sansour. Familiar Phantoms, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the artists.
About the Artists
Larissa Sansour (b. 1973, Palestine) works primarily in film, photography, and installation. Søren Lind (b. 1970, Denmark) is an author, artist, director, and scriptwriter. The duo has collaborated on a series of art projects and films that address the dialectics between myth, documentary, and historical narrative, often through the lens of science fiction. Their work has been presented at film festivals and exhibitions around the world and collected by major art museums. In 2019, they represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale with the video installation In Vitro.
Portrait of Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. Photo: Stella Ojala, courtesy of the artists
Image at top: Søren Lind, Larissa Sansour. In Vitro, 2019. Photo: Courtesy of the artists.