Salarium

Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Sasha Litvintseva and Daniel Mann’s Salarium (2017), on view from Friday, August 28 through Thursday, September 10, 2020.

Departing from the etymological derivation of the words “salary” and “soldier” from “salt,” Salarium explores the entanglement of economic, military, and geological forces as manifested in the phenomenon of sinkholes. Due to the diversion of water from the Jordan river and mineral mining from its waters in the south, thousands of sinkholes have been perforating the shores of the Dead Sea in Israel and Palestine since 1980, covering a wide strip of land that stretches between the water and the vast Judean desert. 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. The sinkholes emerge as both symptom and cause of the failure of a colonial project to instrumentalize nature, collapsing together two temporal scales: the micro-histories of settler colonialism, and the slow disaster produced by the exhaustion of natural resources. As the surface of the earth collapses into the sub-terrain, so does the understanding of territory as mere surface.

Salarium is presented here as one of four films in Part Two | War Machines and Environmental Memories, the second of six programs in the online film and discussion series Ecology After Nature: Industries, Communities, and Environmental Memory​ programmed by Lukas Brasiskis for e-flux Video & Film.

Ecology After Nature runs from August 14 through November 8, 2020. The films in Part Two will screen for two weeks, and subsequent parts will follow bi-weekly, with new films screened every other Sunday.


For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.