The filmmaker travels to the end of the world as a participant of the “Arctic Circle Autumn Expedition“. All around her ice blocks are melting, white air blurs the horizontal lines and her body only marks a tiny spot in the landscape. A journey to the limits of loneliness, of self-discovery and into the experience of an almost unbearable tension between civilization and nature.… >>>
A drone-camera flies over a huge region of industrial agricultural production in the Sorona desert in California. The intricate watering systems, nourished by the Colorado river, form a geometrical landscape, of which each and every inch has been optimized for the agricultural profit. The bird's eye perspective seems to – at first – visually stress the power of man over nature. But in the duration of the film an ambivalence develops: The order and rationality of the images gain an eerie character. Nature and artificiality melt together; the landscape turns into an abstract pattern of lines and dots, while the visual estrangement makes us rethink human interferences on the earth's surface.… >>>
Departing from the etymological derivation of both “salary” and “soldier” from “salt”, the film captures the entanglement of economic, military, and geological forces which manifests itself in the figure of the sinkhole. Perforating the shores of the Dead Sea in Israel and Palestine thousands of sinkholes are 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 had once been a natural treasure to attract tourism and investment, is today a dilapidating site erected on unstable grounds. The resulting landscape appears as both visible symptom and active 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.… >>>