Tuesday 9 March 13:20
Presentation of Salarium at Sonic Acts Academy 2018. By Sasha Litvintseva and Daniel Mann.
by
Iskra Vukšić
Empty, barren landscapes, a road meandering through desert hills and men waiting at a desolate bus stop. A voice enters the imagery to introdroduce the dead sea’s inability to sustain life. It belongs to Eli Raz, a geologist who has inhabited this coast for over forty years, monitoring the changing landscape. That deadness, he explains, has historically inspired an ideological conflict in the region. Considered by priests to be a cursed and divinely punished land, he says scientists were desperate to falsify this biblical theory. The shore is now covered with the small shells of snails, fake evidence brought to the area in support of science. Eli picks them out of the sand introducing this landscapes of erosion in
Salarium, a collaboration between filmmakers Sasha Litvintseva and Daniel Mann.
Salarium documents the geological crisis of the shore, which manifests in the dramatic destruction caused by the emergence of sinkholes in the 1980s. It documents, but it is not quite a documentary. The film plays with its subject matter, expands it, introduces characters and choreography. The landscape is the device through which the filmmakers piece together the history and future of the region by moving back and forth between territorial politics and militarisation, tourism and the beauty industry. Through the holes it documents,
Salarium unveils the political and economic fabric around them as if Jonah, swallowed by the great fish, examines the monster from within its belly.
Salarium is still and symbolic. And for those who want to answer the questions it evokes, it is accompanied by a text in this year’s Sonic Acts reader, which offers historical and theoretical insight from an equally atmospheric approach.
Looking at imagery of dry earth and limited human presence, I get the sense that erosion means more than the literal dissolution of subterranean layers of salt, resulting in sinkholes. Eli tells us that the mineral was once so valuable that it was used to backup ancient currencies and that the word salary stems from salarium, salt. A shaky camera, paired by an ominous bass, leads us through the salt factories. Enormous mountains of salt recall hostile industrial hinterlands, without a human in sight. I imagine the wealth once derived from this sea, the old hotels with access to the beach now buried inside the sinkholes, and the sea-mud promising beauty, youth and luxury worldwide.
Considering its contemporary state however, I struggle to understand the appeal of this region to the few mud-covered tourists strolling around on desolate beaches, surrounded by nothing but modern, half-empty, hotels. Throughout the film, the camera repeatedly returns to three soldiers. They are uniformed but seem to be enjoying some free time, swimming, relaxing, lightly exercising and covering themselves in mud. Their faces are serious and unchanged, their synchronisation wordless and military. Tourism, leisure and luxury for them seem remnants of the past, performed out of habit.
The three soldiers reveal a military presence in the region. The sinkholes lead the film to unearth settler-colonialist strategies of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, such as a displacement of Palestinians through an agricultural occupation of their desert land. The transformation of the desert into fertile grounds, and the harvest of salt and of mud for the beauty industry, set in motion underground erosions. The conditions were always there in the soil, says Eli, but the sinkholes never appeared before. Now there are almost 7000.
The landscape in
Salarium is evidence of a short but intense history of human interference with nature in this region. Towards the end of the film, a man wandering through the desert prophecies:
“Soon we will all live in the light. There will be no planes, no phones, no work. Everybody will work on the land”. We are projected into the future. What appears a big leap in the narrative of the film, forces us to look ahead, as the now porous soil invites sweetwater to penetrate deeper into the earth. Each hole makes new ones possible. We are are not only looking at consequences of the past but at a land which will reject human life in the near future. Continuously exhausted for raw materials and deployed as a military tool, this is the earth's refusal to be instrumentalised.
The sea doesn’t sustain life and the soil is swallowing it, extruding it and coming alive at the expense of it. The three soldiers march aimlessly through the desert.
Salarium closes on Visage’s ‘In the Year 2525’:
“In the year 9595, I’m wondering if man is gonna be alive, he’s taken everything earth had to give, and he’s put nothing back”.
