Score for "Salarium"
(Sasha Litvintseva & Daniel Mann, 2017)
Email grey12@magrathean.org for commissions & more info
film by Sasha Litvintseva & Daniel Mann
41:46 / HD video / 2017
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.
For more information https://www.sashalitvintseva.com/salarium
Special Mention for The Original Music Award for Salarium, Cinéma du Réel, 2018
Jury statement: "The music in this film plays an important role in the narrative, where the anxious soundscapes are very well used: the electronic music of Graeme Arnfield has captured the beauty and anguish of these gaping holes that suddenly form on the surface of the earth, imagining the sound that could make these sinkholes."
An eager couple, Charlotte and Myles, are interrogated by two Home Office agents about their spousal visa application. They endure a series of assessments that become progressively performative to attest to the legitimacy and acceptability of their relationship. ‘TEETH’ addresses the entanglement of love, power, and administration in the UK spousal visa process.
For more information https://jennifer-martin.co.uk/teeth/
Sound Design for "TEETH"
(Jennifer Martin, 2019)
Sound Mixing for
"the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered"
(Onyeka Igwe, 2019)
This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria—retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. So the names have changed tell us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; a story of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown.
For more information https://www.onyekaigwe.com/the-names-have-changed