Salarium
42 min / 2017 / in collaboration with Daniel Mann
Full film here
salarium [latin] - “salary, stipend, pension,” originally “salt-money, soldier’s allowance for the purchase of salt,” noun use of neuter of adjective salarius “pertaining to salt”
Departing from the etymological derivation of both “salary” and “soldier” from “salt”, the film Salarium captures the entanglement of economic, military, and geological forces, which manifests in the figure of the sinkhole. Thousands of sinkholes are today perforating the shores of the Dead Sea in Israel and Palestine, covering a wide strip of land that stretches between the water and the vast Judean desert around. Swallowing the remnants of what used to be a popular beach, a water park, or a settlement, the sinkholes make the land uninhabitable and hazardous. What Zionists once called a Natural Treasure to attract tourism and investment, is today a dilapidating site erected on unstable grounds. The sinkhole appears as both visible symptom and active cause of the failure of a colonial project to instrumentalise nature, collapsing together two temporal scales: the micro-histories of settler colonialism and the slow disaster produced by the exhaustion of natural resources. It appears as the collapsing of the surface into the sub-terrain, with that collapsing the possibility of thinking of territory as mere surface.
Exhibition list:
Premiere: First features competition, Cinema du Reel, Paris, France, 2018 - best soundtrack award
Solo show: Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Germany 2018
Solo screening: ICA, London, UK, 2018
Solo screening: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA, 2019
Duo screening: Union Docs, New York, USA, 2018
Duo screening: Garage Contemporary Art Museum, Moscow, Russia, 2018
Kasseler Dokfest, Kassel, Germany, 2018
RIDM, Montreal, Canada, 2018
Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick, Scotland, 2018
2 Annas Film Festival, Riga, Latvia, 2018 - best documentary award
Sonic Acts, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2018
Featured filmmaker: Doc's Kingdom, Portugal, 2018
Visible Evidence conference, Bloomington, Indiana, USA, 2018
Mumok, Vienna, Austria, 2019
Ecology After Nature, e-flux, 2020
Ecology After Nature, Tramway, Glasgow, 2022
Related:
Geological filmmaking: seeing geology through film and film through geology
As installed at solo show at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Germany, 2018
