Safe

Ali Kazma (Turkey)

Galata Greek Primary School

“Safe is a video about the Global Seed Vault situated in the Svalbard Islands. Situated north of mainland Europe, the islands are about midway between continental Norway and the North Pole. The Vault is designed to serve as a back-up repository for seeds in case of local or global man-made and/or natural catastrophes. Located in one of the coldest areas known to man and buried under a mountain — a natural freezer — the Vault is a testament to man’s contradictory nature. The same species blindly pushing the limits of the Earth’s sustainability through over production/consumption are also building a contemporary Noah’s Ark to sustain those who may survive what is to come.” –AK

Safe is a new video by Istanbul-based artist Ali Kazma that takes visitors inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, a “fail-safe” seed storage facility that holds the largest collection of crop seeds in the world. Concentrating hundreds of thousands of samples representing every cultivated variety important to humans across Earth, the vault opened in 2008 as a “final back-up” of the planet’s crop biodiversity yet was already first used in 2015 to provide replacement seeds for Aleppo.