Natality as world-building in Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind's In Vitro (2019)

Abstract

Abstract

This paper examines Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind's film In Vitro (2019) as a site for reimagining world-building through Hannah Arendt's concept of natality. Set against the backdrop of intertwined colonial and climate catastrophes, the film reframes birth not merely as a biological or spiritual event but as a contested act of creation and renewal. Merging Palestinian historical trauma with global environmental emergencies, In Vitro critiques the colonial ideologies embedded in science fiction by reconfiguring its tropes—time folding, terraforming, and the bunker—into tools for decolonial and ecological thinking. The subterranean bunker, where the plot of the film takes place, becomes a womb-like space, where natality unfolds as a mode of world-building that transcends deterministic narratives and embraces the unpredictability of new beginnings. By questioning the inheritance of personal and collective memories, the film asserts that overcoming catastrophe requires not only technological innovation but also myths, stories, and the capacity to imagine unprecedented futures. Ultimately, In Vitro offers a vision of resilience and plurality, that includes humans and ecosystems, proposing alternative imaginaries for constructing a common world.

Introduction

A ghostly street in what is recognizable as the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, dominates the opening sequence of the film In Vitro (2019) by Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, co-written and co-directed with Søren Lind. Locked doors and closed windows frame the scene, evoking a haunting stillness that is soon shattered by the tumultuous flow of a black liquid coursing through the streets and into the Church of the Nativity. This iconoclastic image evokes apocalyptic tropes familiar from science fiction and resonant with specific environmental catastrophes, such as the 1991 Gulf War oil spill. As the liquid floods, the Church of the Nativity, with its profound cultural and religious significance, becomes a focal point for interrogating the possibilities of new beginnings amid genealogies of destruction.

Traditionally venerated as the birthplace of Jesus, the Church of the Nativity, stands as a site of miracles. Its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first listed under Palestine, imbues the church with another profound cultural and political significance. ¹ In light of ecological and political catastrophes, the church becomes a meditation on the idea of birth itself, its significance echoed in the etymology of “nativity” providing powerful lens to rethink Hannah Arendt's concept of “natality,” the moment each new life enters the world, bringing the potential to initiate change and disrupt the predictable flow of history. Arendt identifies natality as the ontological root of action, “the miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, natural ruin” (Arendt, 1998: 247). In this context, the Church of the Nativity stands as a powerful symbol: its historical association with Jesus's miraculous birth mirrors Arendt's recognition of the inherent miracle in every birth. In Vitro, however, complicates this vision, suggesting alternative and contested forms of birth—particularly the technological interventions implied by the film's title. In this way, I argue, In Vitro reimagines natality as both a political concept and a site of speculative inquiry enmeshed with technology, interrogating its potential within a fractured and uncertain future.

By subverting colonial legacies and science fictional tropes through natality as world-building, In Vitro reframes birth not only as a biological or spiritual event but as a contested act of creation and renewal. This paper positions the film between ecological and political catastrophes (Muller 2022) both deeply entangled with colonial legacies. It then examines the science fictional tropes the film employs: time folding, terraforming, and the bunker, each infused with colonial legacies. By reading these tropes through the concept of natality, I argue that the film transforms them as tools for imagining an alternative future that challenges deterministic categories. The paper concludes by asserting that addressing political and ecological catastrophes requires more than scientific innovation; it demands cultural productions like In Vitro, which illuminate the complex entanglements between colonial legacies and local and global climate crises. As the film shows, resisting colonial legacies of climate change requires not only technological advancements but also myths, heritage, memories, and stories, as well as newcomers to the world who can initiate something unprecedented, offering possibilities for futures that were once unimaginable.

In Vitro: between ecological and political catastrophes

The opening scene of the film ends with a view from above of Bethlehem where explosions and fires are covering the city bringing to mind a sense of danger and urgency that accompany political and ecological catastrophes. In an abrupt change, the subsequent scene reveals an empty subterranean space, featuring concrete columns, neon lighting, a brick wall, and a mysterious, imposing black sphere. A succession of neon lights then illuminates the screen, unveiling the concrete bunker where the narrative unfolds. This bunker serves as the setting for the story which transpires three decades after a catastrophic event has rendered the Earth uninhabitable. The narrative unfolds through the interaction between two scientists: Dunia (played by Hiam Abbass), who appears in the first scene lying on her white deathbed, and Alia (portrayed by Maisa Abd Elhadi), standing at the foot of Dunia's bed, dressed in a retro-futuristic black outfit. Interspersed within scenes set in the underground bunker are flashbacks depicting life before the catastrophe and archival footage capturing Bethlehem's earlier days. The film's grayscale coloring dissolves the visual distinctions between archival and fictional footage, creating a narrative that deliberately blurs the boundaries between historical record, memories of the future, and imaginaries of the past.

In Vitro was first showed as part of Larissa Sansour's “Heirloom” project for the Danish Pavillion at the 58th Venice Biennale next to the mixed-media installation Monument of Lost Time (2019), a 5-m diameter fiberglass and steel sculpture, an iteration of the black sphere that appears in the film. The sculpture, as its name suggests, becomes in the film an empty signifier—a placeholder of meaning devoid of substance. Yet, as part of the installation, the sphere remains enigmatic and does not mediate or convey understanding. Instead, Nat Muller argues, it functions as a prosthesis imbued with a memorial role, akin to traditional monuments that fail to fulfill this role. Outside the narrative framework of the film, the sphere materializes as a static, unarticulated embodiment of forgetfulness and loss. In this sense, it stands as a failed object, unable to communicate a coherent message that symbolizes an apocalyptic endpoint where meaning ceases (Muller, 2022: 88). In the film, the sphere represents, it seems, Alia's anxieties, fears and longing, she looks at it intensely, bringing her hand almost to touch it but holding it still a few centimeters before the surface, trying to feel its heartbeat.

The black and white film is presented by means of a split-screen format, that emphasizes dichotomies of time and space: past and present; underground and above ground; the architectural materiality of the ancient city, with its arched windows and painted tiles, set against the brutalist concrete architecture of the bunker with its neon lights, long corridors, and concrete walls. These dichotomies are replicated throughout the lived experiences of the two protagonists: Dunia's (at times nostalgic) memories of life before the apocalypse and Alia's immediate reality rooted in the influx of inherited memories that are not her own but nonetheless inundate her mind. Alia, the young protagonist, born in the bunker under the earth, is the clone of Dunia's daughter who died following the ecological disaster. Her consciousness is populated with implanted memories of tender moments—scenes of enjoying fresh air, harvesting olive trees, and playing in a beautiful house—that feel intimately familiar despite their artificial origin. These memories, while not her own lived experiences, resonate with the same emotional weight as her actual memories of bunker life. By blurring the boundaries between authentic and constructed remembrance, the film interrogates the very nature of memory itself—challenging viewers to consider how personal and collective memories are fundamentally constructed, performative, and flexible. The relationship between Alia and Dunia emerges as a profound exploration of this complexity, embodying a mother–daughter connection that is simultaneously biological and enmeshed with technology. Their bond reveals a new form of transindividual kinship, one that is intricately woven through genetic inheritance, implanted memories, and technological mediation, expanding traditional notions of connection and belonging.

Following Alia's gaze, as the film moves through its opening sequence, we see an orchard of olive trees and indigenous Palestinian flora thriving within the confines of the bunker. “Each morning, I wake up to this rumbling, the sound of the underground. You hear it too?” (In Vitro 2019, 3:20) says Dunia as she opens her eyes to face Alia. “I hear it” answers Alia, “the murmurs of the bedrock.” Subsequently, Dunia notes, “I only escape the reality of our entombment when they switch on the orchard lights, and I hear the birds, bees and butterflies” (In Vitro 2019, 4:50). The birds, bees, and butterflies who wake in response to the artificial lights are a reminder for Dunia of the past in the outer world above ground, but for Alia they are part of the underground world into which she was born. They are, for her, adjacent to “the murmurs of the bedrock.” By creating disturbing representations of what is recognized as “nature” (the orchard, daylight, birds and butterflies) or as “Palestinians” in the artificial environment of the bunker-laboratory, the film troubles the boundaries of what is known and the forms through which this knowledge is represented.

In the film, there are no borders, no partitions, and while the setting is recognizably Palestine, the signifier “Palestine” is absent. Place figures at a narrative level through references to “here” and “elsewhere” “this place” and “other places,” while the visual unfolding distinguishes between above ground and underground. The film presents the city of Bethlehem which is also the city of Sansour's childhood as the home of the protagonists: Dunia's aboveground, and Alia's underground. Contrary to Sansour's previous films in which Palestinian motifs are poignantly recognizable by means of a Palestinian flag, a single female astronaut carries to the moon in A Space Exodus (2008), the names of Palestinian sites that appear on the elevator in Nation Estate (2012) or the motif of traditional keffiyeh that appears on the porcelain plates in In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2016), In Vitro, negotiates Palestinian symbolism and embroiders it delicately into the film featuring the Palestinian experience of exile not as a sectorial problem but as part of global ecological and political crises. It is not only the exodus to the bunker that the protagonists have to face but as Dunia says, also “every exodus before that” (In Vitro 2019,10:7), clearly gesturing to the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa ² . The subterranean exodus of the bunker functions, as Nat Muller discusses, “as a trope of dislocation” echoing the experience of many Palestinian under occupation for which “home is close yet out of reach” (Muller, 2019: 13). In the film, however, the Palestinian condition of exile appears as a symptom that foresees the future, not only for Palestinians but for humankind, because as Dunia says in the film “disasters evolve more rapidly here” (In Vitro 2019,7:8). These accumulative disasters (Muller 2022: 80) framed through the film's science fictional esthetic, set the stage for a deeper analysis of how time folding, terraforming, and the bunker challenge colonial narratives and articulate new modes of world-building.

Science fiction and colonial legacies

Literary scholar John Rieder (2008) has argued that colonialism served as an essential historical context for the emergence of science fiction, positioning the genre as deeply entangled with ideologies of empire. Utopian and satirical depictions of encounters between European travelers and non-Europeans, such as Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), were foundational texts in the prehistory of science fiction. These narratives framed “discovered” lands and their inhabitants as sites of European imagination, critique, or conquest, thereby reinforcing colonial logics. During the late nineteenth century, at the height of imperial expansion, the formal emergence of science fiction as a genre coincided with colonial imagination's peak influence. Scholars such as Darko Suvin (1983) and Thomas Clareson (1985) noted how this period's narratives borrowed heavily from imperialist discourses, presenting alien worlds as spaces for exploration, exploitation, and conquest. Rieder further underscored this connection, observing that by the last decades of the nineteenth century, colonial territories were often imagined as “otherworldly” spaces that provided a new kind of narrative significance. The alien landscapes of colonies, with their “exotic” flora, fauna, and peoples, became symbolic stand-ins for the imaginative leap to extraterrestrial or futuristic worlds, effectively calling “new worlds into being” within a framework of domination and exploitation (Rieder, 2008:6).

Within this context, In Vitro engages with and subverts these colonial legacies, reimagining the speculative tools of science fiction through the lens of Arabfuturism. Arabfuturism is a speculative artistic movement that reclaims the future for Arab subjects, disrupting colonial narratives that have historically objectified the Middle East, positioning Arab identities as agents of historical and future-making processes. Jordanian artist Sulaiman Majali articulated this vision in his 2015 manifesto “Towards Arabfuturism/s,” which critiques the “oceans of historical fiction” surrounding Arab identity and seeks to “bulldoze cultural nostalgias that prop up a dubious political paralysis.” For Majali, Arabfuturism is a radical reorientation, a celebration of “temporalities of our collaborative genealogies” that seeks to reimagine the Arab world as a subject, not an object, of history. Media theorist Jussi Parikka builds on this framework, emphasizing that Arabfuturism articulates “histories of dispossession as part of imaginary futures,” crafting “counterfuturisms” that resist dominant colonial and imperial temporalities (Parikka 2018). Within this practice, In Vitro emerges as a striking example of Arabfuturism, appropriating and reconfiguring science fiction tropes to interrogate colonial histories and imagine alternative futures rooted in resilience, survival, and reclamation.

For over a decade, Larissa Sansour has positioned herself as a leading practitioner of Arabfuturism, using science fiction as a medium to explore themes of dispossession, identity, and memory. In Vitro exemplifies this approach by appropriating and reimagining three central tropes of science fiction—folding time, terraforming, and the bunker. These tropes, which are historically linked to colonial ideologies of expansion, transformation, and control, are recast in the film to challenge the legacies of imperialism. The folding of time, a motif that suggests non-linear temporalities, is a central trope of science fiction. This is also a recurring motif in British colonizers’ accounts of their encounters with overseas “wilderness” which they regarded as a form of traveling to the past. In the film, however, the folding of time, disrupts linear historical narratives often used to justify colonial expansion. Terraforming, typically associated with the colonial transformation of alien worlds into habitable spaces that usually take the form of European landscapes, is reimagined in In Vitro as a reflection on environmental devastation and the search for sustainable co-existence with indigenous ecosystems. Lastly, the bunker, a space often tied to militarized survivalist narratives, becomes, in the film, a “womb,” as Dunia points out in one of the striking dialogs between the protagonists, and a locus for heritage, memory, and the negotiation of identity. These reconfigurations allow the film to subvert science fiction's colonial legacies and use them as a heuristic for exploring a different political imagination. In the following sections, I analyze the way these tropes function within In Vitro, in their relationship with colonial legacies. I further explore their radical recontextualization in the film for imagining futures beyond dispossession, based on natality as an organizing concept for world-building.

Folding time: between past present and future

Israeli colonialism has produced an escalating sense of alarming perspectives towards the future; a sense that Palestinians do not have a future. This sense is reinforced by the catastrophes of the past, the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Naksa, and their ongoing unfolding in the atrocities that the state of Israel has committed towards Palestinians since then which are all too tragically tangible in the current catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, as this paper is being written. For Maurice Ebileeni, the only future that can be imagined from this political reality is nonbeing. As he notes, “Palestine, it would appear, has been steadily progressing toward a state of nonbeing – an epistemic all-consuming void of sorts” (Ebileeni, 2023). Contrary to the Palestinian art that evolved in the decades after the Nakba that focused, on the one hand, on an ideal past, pre- Nakba, and on the other hand on the unbearable conditions of the present engulfed in occupation, displacement and exile (Ankori, 2006), over the last decade, some Palestinian writers and artists have shifted their focus towards the future by embracing the genre of science fiction. One example of this shift is the collection Palestine +100 – Stories from a Century after the Nakba edited by Basma Ghalayini and published in 2019. ³ The shift from the past to the future allows artists as Larissa Sansour to explore the nation's ongoing trajectory amidst what El Shakry has identified as “the forces of cultural, historical, and territorial erasure” (El Shakry, 2021). Thus, the envisioning of Palestinian futures is posited as a deliberate act of resistance, projecting defiance towards dystopian prospects (Quevillion, 2021).

In Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson, understands temporality as science fiction's “structurally unique ‘method’ for apprehending the present as history . . . irrespective of the ‘pessimism’ or ‘optimism’ of the imaginary future world which is the pretext for that defamiliarization” (Jameson, 2005: 228). Science fiction generates awareness of the historicity of the present, regardless of whether it presents a utopian or a dystopian future. Larissa Sansour's work, as Ebileeni (2023) has shown, embraces the potential of this structurally unique method in apprehending the Palestinian present as history, showing in her work a unique engagement with the complexities of science fiction's temporalities and a deepening relationship with what recent scholarship frames as the ruins of modernity (DeLoughrey 2019, Tsing 2015) and what Robert Duggan has understood as “the ruins of the future” (Duggan, 2020). By showing the present as history, In Vitro invites the viewers to distance themselves from the present in order to judge it from the distant perspective of the future and rethink its inheritance. In Vitro then taps into science fiction's enduring fascination with historical narratives by skillfully manipulating temporality. In doing so, the film not only engages with a core aspect of the science fiction tradition but also sheds light on the specificity of the Palestinian condition.

In a conversation with Lindsey Moore on the role of science fiction in her work, Sansour notes how the genre of science fiction “works formally for the Palestinian pre­dicament because our identity is suspended between the past and the future. The Palestinian present is an odd space, a limbo” (Moore, 2019: 111). The blurring of the distinction between memories of the past, the present and the future is central to the film—as it is in Sansour's previous works—and is sharply worded in the dialogs between Dunia and Alia, who have different ideas about, “what was and what's to come” (In Vitro 2019,11:7). A central thread in their dialogue involves the question of how to relate to the past. While Dunia thinks that we have to learn from our memories, Alia thinks that we need to start anew. Dunia creates a reverse chronology by stating that “the present imposes its language, projecting the meaning of this very moment onto the past. The past never was, it only is” (In Vitro 2019,14:7–14:9). The past, Dunia tries to convince Alia, is always re-written from the perspective of the present: it exists only in its current version. The film, however, does not completely align with either Alia's or Dunia's viewpoint, but emerges as a third protagonist. By layering multiple perspectives, the film reveals a deeper epistemological density. The archival materials are not presented as objective truth, but as constructed narratives that require critical interpretation. This approach suggests that understanding historical experiences, particularly in the context of exile and catastrophe, demands more than a linear accumulation of facts or a simple rejection of historical memory. Instead, the film proposes a dialogic approach to knowledge, where multiple temporalities coexist and interact, challenging viewers to recognize the fluid, nature of historical understandings. Knowledge and facts, while important, the film teaches us, are not enough for understanding the past and imagining the future.

Throughout the film, the camera moves from scenes of the past, fading memories of the last days before the apocalypse represented for the viewer through the devastation of the city of Bethlehem, and the present of the fictional world that takes place in the concrete bunker that houses Dunia and Alia. These alternations raise questions about how memory and trauma pass from generation to generation showing how metaphors of exile are literalized in the film through its use of science fictional tropes, which as Keren Omry argues is “precisely how science fiction works” (Omry 2024). Alongside the protagonists’ memories of the past, the film includes images of another, distant past represented through archival footage of earlier nineteenth century Bethlehem and another less distant past, represented by images of refugees crossing the Allenby Bridge following the 1967 war, acquired from the Imperial War Museum and UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East]. The archival images anchor In Vitro's narrative in the history and geopolitics of Palestine and its multiple colonial legacies. They provide the temporal and spatial identifiers that mark Dunia and Alia's world as the world of Palestinian exile and thus as “a discontinuous state of being” (Said, 1984: 51).

The historical footage undermines the boundary between the near past of fictionalized climate catastrophe and the more distant past of the mid-twentieth century emphasizing that climate catastrophe is only one of the many disasters that have befallen the Palestinian people. Of particular importance is the Nakba, the formative Palestinian trauma that endures over time and figures as a collective historical, cultural, and political memory within Palestinian society and its diasporas (Masalha 2012, Saloul 2012). Sansour's and Lind's introduction of archival footage into the film works to convey the insight that time in the film is not linear but dialectical and not fixed but expansive. The film prompts a critical assessment of experiences through the imagination, connecting actual experiences with possible ones, extending them into alternative pasts, presents, and futures. Scenes in which mother and daughter escape the catastrophe, while in the background the city is set alight, sharply mark traumatic moments of loss which in Palestinian collective experience are tied to the exile of the Nakba and the subsequent exiles, the military occupation, and the everyday institutional violence the Palestinian people have endured since then. These representations resonate with Alia's characterization of a “[a] liturgy chronicling our losses,” (In Vitro 2019,17:10) a concept that aligns with Moore and Ahmed's (2015: 19) analysis of “chronic trauma” as a defining feature of Palestinian experience—a trauma that is simultaneously mundane and extraordinary, materially embedded in daily life, and persistently recurring.

The imagination emerges in In Vitro not only as a forward-projecting force but also as a dynamic influence that inscribes itself into the past and manifests in the present. Against a political reality in which Palestinians have been robbed of futurity, and Palestine as a place is “devoid of world-building,” as Sansour puts it in a conversation with curator Nat Muller, her use of science fictional devices—as a genre that seeks to imagine the future—is particularly generative. ⁴ Sansour's work speaks about stolen futures and anticipated memories, positioning the present of Palestine as part of the past of the film, thus suggesting in In Vitro a dystopian form of world-building that nonetheless holds a future.

Through its manipulation of temporality, In Vitro resists the colonial logic of linear time that views the past as a fixed origin and the future as a trajectory of domination or loss. Instead, the film reclaims time as a layered, dialectical construct, where past, present, and future intersect and inform one another. This approach aligns with Arendt's notion of natality, emphasizing the capacity for new beginnings amid devastation. By folding time, In Vitro positions natality as the foundation for a new mode of world-building—one that defies colonial erasure and reimagines Palestinian futures not as inevitable endpoints of nonbeing but as spaces for unpredictable, creative, and plural possibilities. In this way, the film transforms the trope of time folding into a tool for collective memory and speculative renewal, anchoring a vision of resilience within the fractured temporality of exile.

Terraforming

Terraforming, a prominent concept in both politics and science fiction, involves reshaping landscapes for specific purposes through geo-engineering. Originating from imperial and colonial endeavors that sought to exploit new territories by erasing indigenous ecosystems and cultures, this drive to “terraform” places like America and Asia mirrored the transplantation of European cultural life seen in the names of colonial settlements such as New York and New Amsterdam. The pursuit of new territories is a recurring theme in science fiction literature that appears in titles like The Sands of Mars (1951) by Arthur C. Clarke or Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert readapted in the 2021 film Dune directed by Denis Villeneuve or the 1990's Mars trilogy series by Kim Stanley Robinson. In these works of science fiction, advanced technologies create possibilities for first controlling other planets—Mars in the works above mentioned—and then scientifically monitoring its environment to make it suitable for human colonization. Tracing a genealogy of terraforming in classical science fiction literature, Chris Pak writes that “[b]oth sci­ence fiction and speculative science about terrafor­ming represent an important archive of debate about the values and practices that underpin the shaping of an environmental future and a responsive contempo­rary engagement with anthropogenic climate change. Narratives of terraforming and geo-engineering are, at their core, narratives about the Anthropocene” (Pak, 2018: 500). The politics of terraforming moving from real colonial practices to fictional tales—and vice versa—are exemplified by Elon Musk's latest ventures aiming to transport humans to space and colonize Mars.

In The Nutmeg's Curse, Amitav Ghosh (2021) shows how the dynamics of climate change are entrenched in the geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism established on the basis of the conquest and exploitation of both human life and the natural environment. As European colonists subjugated, oppressed, enslaved, killed, and destroyed vast areas of the Americas and Asia, they carried the mechanistic view of a supine nature across the world. This lay at the foundation of everything that followed, from capitalism to climate change. Put differently, colonialism and capitalism, Ghosh asserts, have paved the way for climate change and are closely entangled with it. The climate crisis of our times, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning. These dynamics are, echoed in Sansour's film while at the same time reappropriated so as to further a decolonial and ecological approach that invests them with new political meanings.

In Vitro presents the climate catastrophe as both specific and global. “Others were beginning to experience what we had seen for years. But it was clear no place would be spared” (In Vitro 2019, 7:10) says Dunia while the visual sequence in the film displays the abandoned Palestinian city of Bethlehem covered by wild flora. These haunting images show the aftermath of an ecological disaster, part of a larger climate catastrophe: one that would spare no place, as Dunia says. Amitav Ghosh argues that the biggest crisis of our times is the climate crisis which has brought humanity to the midst of “the great acceleration,” a distinct phase of planetary history which converges with the will towards “omnicide,” that is the total destruction of humanity on Earth. Our most effective antidote is “vitalism”—a term that Ghosh resurrects from ancient and medieval European philosophy to shorthand the geo-cosmogonies of Native Americans as representative of indigenous populations crushed underfoot by Empire's onward march. In Sansour and Lind's film, “vitalism” takes a different form that engages a tradition of Palestinian women as environmentalist and anti-colonial warriors to quote Shqair and Soliman (2022). The commitment of the women in the film to keep alive and restore the indigenous flora of Palestine through the orchard they grow underground speaks to the ecofeminist tradition featuring the intimate relationship between women, as nurturers, and nature. However, the film challenges the essentialism and romanticizing of women and nature enclosed in this view. In the film, care for the earth and motherhood are not rooted in the biology of the female protagonists’ bodies but in their training as scientists and in their political choices.

Against the backdrop of a global climate catastrophe, the infrastructure of the bunker and the controlled recreation of indigenous flora gesture towards the terraforming topology of conventional science fiction. The bunker is a built environment that scientifically simulates the needed conditions for human life. Without scientific careful monitoring, life underground would be unlivable, just as in the planet Mars. Yet, in the bunker, what Dunia and Alia do is something different, they are trying not to control and monitor another world but to keep the world with its native human and more than human organisms alive for the sake of the world or what Arendt would call “for love of the world.” ⁵ What they do is not terraforming in its colonial context, but world-building.

The bunker

In the underground, olive trees crowd a designated patch, herbs are grown under glaring artificial light behind protective glass, hothouses vertically line the bunker's shaft, and lines of screens monitor the whole operation. In the bunker depicted in the film, everything is functional and scientifically geared towards survival of human and non-human life through technological reproduction. The work's title In Vitro suggests experiments in a closed and controlled environment. The work's title in Arabic, المختبر (The Laboratory), stresses this point even more. Yet the laboratory is not only a place for generating new ideas but also for maintaining old ones, it is a shelter, and an archive, an orchard, and a bunker.

The bunker, a monument to “total war” (Virilio, 1997: 11), is arguably the most iconic end-of-the-world architecture, instantiated throughout Europe and the United States in the form of concrete buildings. These underground structures built in preparation for a nuclear war were reproduced in science fiction films and TV series in preparation for the ultimate apocalypse. ⁶ The bunker requires envisioning the apocalypse in the most detailed form, since once the apocalypse arrives there is no time to build a bunker. Preparedness, a key element of contemporary anticipatory politics (Barker, 2020) is rooted in a modern imaginary of the future as a time-space filled with threat (Horn, 2018). This readiness mindset shapes present actions in anticipation of unforeseen future events, fostering a sense of apprehension and urgency aimed at prompting proactive measures, in order to achieve a state of preparedness (Taylor, 2023).

Imagining catastrophic futures is key to the actual architecture of a bunker. For the protagonists of In Vitro, catastrophe is an element of the past that melts into the present and projects itself into the future. Put differently, in the film, the bunker signifies a time in which past, present, and future dissolve into traumatic experiences of exile. These experiences are not identical for Dunia and Alia. Dunia's exile is showed throughout the scenes in which we see her with her daughter, in the country side or in their home. In other scenes, we witness the two leaving in a hurry, while in the background a lightning storm threatens to destroy their home. These scenes are intertwined throughout the film with scenes of an empty home, showing broken chairs, coffee cups on the floor as leftovers of a life left behind. Alia's exile takes a different form. It is an exile from herself: “I was raised on nostalgia,” she says, “the past spoon-fed to me. My own memories replaced by those of others. They appear personal and intimate. They're not real, but seductive […] Out of touch with life down here… like bacteria planted in me"(In Vitro 2019,8:6–8:8). Alia describes a split between her memories, “replaced by those of others” and her experiences, that culminates in her asserting “I'm not the first me” (In Vitro 2019,9:7). The bunker houses different exiles for Alia and Dunia. For Dunia, the bunker is a temporary shelter, her place of exile; while Alia describes her exile as an ontological condition, an exile from herself and from her place of origin, a “congenital exile” in her words. In an exchange of words between them, Dunia says to Alia: “You were born, but you are still trapped in the womb” (In Vitro 2019, 9:8). While for Alia the bunker is the present—it is her reality and the only reality she knows, Dunia recognizes the bunker as a prison, a laboratory, and a shelter for the conservation of genetic data in living organisms.

Data loss is perceived in the collective imagination as the epitome of a catastrophic future. In the cold-war era, the data archived in bunkers was military data stored in analog form about the state and its enemies. More recently, abandoned cold-war-era bunkers are making a comeback as places for the storage of digital data. Corporations and governments are moving their valuable digital information into bunkers as a way of facilitating ultra-security for their data. In this new rebranding, the cold-war nuclear bunker promises preparedness for a new existential threat: the unending prospect of digital data loss (Taylor 2023). Instead of representing a significant departure or discontinuity in the role of the bunker, contemporary data centers housed underground uphold a tradition of subterranean data storage.

In Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind's film, the bunker-laboratory serves as a unique repository for data: both human genetic data and the genetic data of plants indigenous to Palestine. This archive of memory is not merely a means of preservation but a tool for reviving the specificity of a place, by restoring and healing Palestinian cultural and natural ecosystems. The orchard that grows in the bunker, as discussed by Hannah Boast (2023), brings to mind the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, often referred to as the “Doomsday” vault. This facility safeguards over a million seed varieties from across the globe, ensuring their preservation for potential use in the event of a catastrophe. Similarly, the orchard resonates with the work of Palestinian artist Vivien Sansour and her Palestine Heirloom Seed Library which aims to conserve endangered seed varieties native to Palestine, lining ecological preservation to cultural survival. ⁷ This preservation effort is deeply intertwined with the Palestinian concept of “sumud,” or steadfastness, which emphasizes resilience and endurance, signifying resistance through staying rooted in the land (Shqair and Soliman 2021). In the film, the concept of “sumud” acquires another layer: entering the bunker, like the roots of trees and herbs, becomes an act not just of escaping but rather of staying and remaining. The bunker is transformed into more than a shelter from catastrophe; it becomes a place where roots are formed, a place of natality and new beginnings.

In In Vitro, the bunker transcends its role as a symbol of apocalypse to become a site of creation, transformation, and renewal. By intertwining the preservation of genetic data and the growth of an orchard with the scientific reproduction of life, the bunker is reimagined not merely as a shelter but as a womb—a space where natality is enacted. The clone, Alia, embodies this reconfiguration of life: not human in the conventional sense, but undeniably human in her capacity to act and feel, think and imagine. The bunker in the film, with its convergence of technological artifice and organic life, disrupts the dystopian logic of preparedness and turns it into a generative act of world-building. As a womb-like space, it enacts natality by gesturing toward the unpredictability and possibility of new beginnings, reaffirming the centrality of creation even in the shadow of catastrophic loss.

Natality as world-building

Hannah Arendt's concept of natality offers a reflective framework for understanding birth as an act of renewal and world-building. In The Human Condition (1998), Arendt writes about the world as a common world in two different ways: the world is what stands in between human beings while at the same time, it is what allows different human beings to relate to each other through its objects. Put differently, the world is what unites humans and separates them at the same time, but nonetheless is what humans share with each other. The common world is for Arendt:

“What we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die. It transcends our lifespan into past and future alike; it was there before we came and will outlast our brief sojourn in it. It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us” (Arendt, 1998: 55).

In In Vitro, this shared world, is both threatened and reimagined. The orchard in the subterranean bunker, where olive trees grow under artificial light, embodies a dual temporality and portrays a profound sense of responsibility for both the past and the future. The olive trees that are seen in the orchard are a living relic of the past and a promise for the future. Olive trees take years to start bearing fruits and Palestinians have historically planted olive trees to pass them on to future generations, they are considered an investment in the future. The orchard, like the living body of Alia and the memories inscribed in her DNA, embody a commitment to the continuity of “the common world.”

Central to Arendt's understanding of the common world is her radical reconceptualization of natality as political action. Writing against the philosophical tradition that considered human beings as beings-toward-death, Arendt emphasizes birth as the central moment for political thought (Arendt 1998: 9). ⁸ She argues that since “action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting” (Arendt 1998: 9). Politics and natality are bound together because politics depends on the capacity to bring about the new. The fact that new humans are constantly born into the world shows how the new is possible, and how plurality—a central idea in Arendt's understanding of the common world—comes about. In this sense, In Vitro stages natality not merely as biological reproduction but as a radical reconfiguration of identity, agency, and political potential.

In the film, Alia embodies “the new.” She is the only clone who survived, but not the first one, many generations of clones came before her and did not survive (Muller 2022). She is a miracle for Dunia, yet through her words and actions she creates her own unique self, what Arendt considers a second instance of natality: “with word and deed, we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance” (Arendt, 1998: 176–177). This “second birth” is the moment when an individual is born into the political sphere. As Arendt scholar Jeffry Champlin (2013) has showed, this second birth challenges deterministic views and highlights the potential for individuals to initiate actions that can transform the political world.

Another aspect of natality that is important to consider to which Arendt herself only gestured and her readers developed has to do with our sense of community. When one dies, even while surrounded by family and friends, one dies alone. However, when one is born, one is always born out of another body, one is never born alone. “Our coming to be is therefore never a singular or solitary emerging into being; it is always from the very start, a matter of plurality” (O'byrne, 2010: 106). Therefore, as Bowen-Moore argues: “the question of beginning, of natality, is ultimately linked to one's sense of communal identity, that is to say, linked to one's sense of belonging and to one's way of comporting oneself in a world inhabited by and shared with others” (Bowen-Moore, 1989: 9). Natality is intricately intertwined with both space and time: one is born in a specific moment and in a specific place. Simultaneously, birth signifies entry into the broader world and integration into a community of others. This community embodies a universal connection among all human beings, that in a sense subverts time and space, while also representing a distinct entity with its own history and culture.

Natality allows us to see Alia neither as subjugated to the Palestinian condition of exile, nor subjugated to the climate crises but as a newcomer to the world as she negotiates her way through both crises. She refuses, at moments, to embody Dunia's heritage and challenges her perception of the past as a place that one can return to, while at the same time she is committed to the rehabilitation of a place she has never seen with her eyes but can see on her mind. This negotiation is marked through the movement between the intimacy and the distance between Alia and Dunia which is seen via the filmographic device. For most of the film, the women appear in different screens defiantly facing each other, yet at one gentle moment their hands are entangled, holding each other in one single screen.

The film also complicates Arendt's caution against technological singularity. Reconsidering the relevance of The Human Condition for our current times, Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz writes:

…"since humans are conditioned beings, the change from living as split beings—earthly in our subjection to fate and worldly in our human capacity to create our own humanly built world—to living uniformly in a fully artificial and alienated world, threatens to transform humanity itself. The transformation Arendt describes as the threat of the forces of science, artificial intelligence, and the merging of man with machines is the loss of our earthly human plurality to the technological singularity. Unless, in thinking what we are doing, we choose to act to hold on to our humanity.”

Berkowitz (2018).

The cloning of humans and the artificial growing of plants and trees, as depicted in the film, is definitely part of what Arendt had in mind when writing about the threat of science and the singularity it imposes “on our earthly human plurality,” as Berkowitz puts it. Yet, the film offers a more complex relationship between technology and singularity allowing us to rethink “our earthly human plurality” together with technology and not against it.

The human survival in the film is tied to artificial technologies of cloning and reproduction in vitro, yet, it is human nonetheless and as such it is rooted in the unpredictability of new beginning. In the unfolding of the plot, Alia shows that although she is a clone, her existence cannot be reduced to the singularity of a technological reproduction. “The artificial premise of my existence” Alia says to Dunia “makes it no less real than yours” (In Vitro 2019, 16:57). Although the DNA that runs through Alia's body is Dunia's daughter's DNA, it is different. It has been modeled and transformed through Alia's own lived experiences constructing a form of epigenetic legacy. Epigenetics refers to the way in which environmental and post-traumatic behaviors affect how genes work and change. And although epigenetic changes do not change the DNA, they do change the manner in which the body reads the DNA sequences. In conversation with Anthony Downey, Sansour speaks of the film's engagement with epigenetics and its relation to trauma, particularly in the Palestinian context, and asks: “If the total sum of your ancestors’ accomplishments, traumas, ambitions, errors, and experiences is already with you from birth, what are the options for breaking away from this heritage and carving out a new direction?” (Downey, 2019: 64). Alia negotiates her relationship with her DNA and with the collective memories and inheritance it dictates resisting their weight; because, although a clone, Alia is not programmable but seeks to carve out a new direction. In this sense, we might consider her to embody aspects of the radical Arendtian concept of natality imagined anew in the world of the bunker.

Conclusion

Cultural productions in general and science fiction in particular, as Darko Suvin has showed, have the power to estrange the familiar and to familiarize the strange, in order to experiment with imaginary futures (Suvin, 1972, 1979). The Laboratory, the Arabic name of the film is not only a place for scientific experiments but a place to experiment with political positionalities, ecological futures, and forms of resistance. In the film, the colonial condition of Palestine blends into different historical and fictional exiles that take place in the underground bunker providing a unique venue to explore the human-non-human entanglement under conditions of political and ecological disaster which as the film shows, cannot be thought of separately. The distinct Palestinian experience of trauma and exile is unspoken but haunts the narrative of the film. It does not compete with the global loss of Earth to humanity, nor are these disasters conflated; rather, they co-exist in their respective devastation (Muller, 2022). Both disasters: the particular Palestinian disaster, and the global climate disaster, are the result of long colonial practices and converge in the underground locale of the film.

By activating the concept of natality, the film critiques the colonial traditions embedded in science fiction and proposes alternative imaginaries rooted in resilience, memory, and plurality. The subterranean orchard, for example, serves as a symbol of continuity and survival while also as an emblem of the shared responsibility for preserving the common world. Similarly, Alia's status as a clone challenges traditional notions of identity and heritage, embodying the potential of natality to disrupt deterministic narratives and envision unforeseen futures.

Arendt views the historical Jesus as central to her understanding of action, emphasizing his faith in the power to perform miracles as a radical form of freedom that disrupts natural processes and introduces the wholly unexpected (Arendt, 1998: 246–247). For her, this capacity to perform miracles reflects the essence of natality—the infinite improbability of new beginnings. In this way, the film's portrayal of the bunker as a “womb” parallels the Church of the Nativity symbolic association with renewal and birth. Just as the Church of the Nativity represents the miraculous inception of a new world in Christian tradition, the bunker becomes a space where natality is enacted—a site where life is recreated, not as a repetition of the past but as a reinvention of the future and as a form of world-building.

In Vitro articulates the notion of world-building, to include more-than-human entities: plants and trees, water and soil, animals and air alongside humans, their memories, stories and heritage. This collective imagining resists catastrophic futures by highlighting the interconnectedness of all life forms. In his book, The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh writes: that

“The Anthropocene presents a challenge not only to the arts and humanities, but also to our common-sense understandings and beyond that to contemporary culture in general. […] Indeed, this is perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense—for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (Ghosh, 2017: 17).

The film encapsulates this crisis of culture and imagination by showing that addressing political and ecological catastrophes we need to look not only at the political legacy of imperialism but also at its cultural legacy- in this case that of science fiction. And indeed, in order to start overcoming this legacy, we need—as the film demonstrates—cultures of resistance to build a common world on Earth.

Dunia's science is an attempt on her part to capture the cloned daughter as a vehicle for keeping lost generation's memories alive, through the retelling of their stories. Yet, as Alia shows in the film, she is not a monument to past generations and she has her own story to tell, her own exile to endure and her own vision for the future. The narrative portrayed in the film diverges from the individual stories of Dunia and Alia. Instead, it focuses on what rests in between these stories. In order to build a common world, the film shows we need both Alia and Dunia with their differences, in their plurality. We need technology, heritage, memories, and stories as we need newcomers that can initiate something new that could not be previously imagined.

For Arendt the condition of natality is the condition of being born into the world, and this natality is rooted in the capacity to start anew, the capacity to go against and beyond that which is foreseen. Put differently the human condition of natality is also the surprise of the unexcepted, the unpredictable which cannot be fully prescribed. This is because “the new,” for Arendt,

“Always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world.” (Arendt, 1998: 178)

The future cannot be imagined in advance; instead, it arises from the unpredictability of birth—both human and non-human—and the capacity for action against all odds. In its nuanced portrayal of the two protagonists navigating exile death and renewal, the film exemplifies Arendt's insight that “the new” arises from the miraculous unpredictability of birth, and it is through this miracle that we can imagine and build worlds anew.

Highlights

In Vitro (2019) is situated at the edge of a climate catastrophe, large-scale destruction and the threat of humanity's erasure.

Using science fiction tropes, the film moves between the past, and the present that takes place in a concrete bunker.

A scientist creates an underground orchard using heirloom native seeds.

Clones of children lost to the disaster are engineered to embody memories that do not belong to them.

Arendt's perceptions of natality and the common world are employed to show the revolutionary potential of In Vitro.