Sun Sea Salt


Pharaonic Labour. 450 years of medieval colonialist servitude, then machines.

Machines: deliverance or dispossession and displacement?

Lack of social/cultural/infrastructural evolution for 450 years, sun and sea and salt and fish, barren landscape, anachronistic idyllic utopian machine, inhabitants fixed unchanging volitionless coefficients for 450 years, until an external colonialistic entity introduces variation in the form of machinery/industrialization.

Sea salt is what remains when water is spent, when matter is spent, when the body is spent, when energy is spent, a fusion of sunlight and water crystalized into a bright glowing white geometrical structure, a cubic structure seemingly forged from liquid light energy, dregs, ashes, dust, classified as a mineral, a mineral comprised of 80 essential chemical elements, a mineral essential in sustaining human and animal and ocean life, in addition to many plant lives. Salt is essential to amniotic fluid; like the seas and oceans, amniotic fluid is extremely salty and that salty environment is necessary to producing and fostering the growth of the human embryo.

The human mechanics of salt milling parallel anatomical interactions of salt and water: pre-programmed robotic factoryline clockwork, precise, balanced, each gesture and and cellular process hereditary. Except sea salt mining necessitates dehydration of water from shallow water pockets in order to isolate and extract salt, whereas the human body, replete with oceans of water within the cells and throughout the body, necessitates a perfect balance of salt and water to avoid the debilitating and lethal effects of dehydration.

It's hard to lambast the exploitative machine of salt mining because salt is essential. Everybody needs salt and somebody has to extract it. The director muted the political/social critique, instead translating the labour into something that is part of the natural order of the universe of Araya, the people a special species created for the sole purpose of salt extraction, an approach that invites challenging questions. Isn't human labour part of the natural order of the universe? What is wrong with manual labour? Do we really want to introduce mechanical industrialization in such a purely natural environment? Do we really want to introduce into this environment all the social/political mechanisms designed to protect workers and enhance their quality of life, mechanisms that always do as much harm as good? Why interrupt something that is not as bad as it appears to be? Fruit pickers and slaughterhouse workers and landfill/soild-waste workers in the USA have it 1000x worse than the people of Araya did 50-something years ago pre-machinery. There is nothing wrong about people choosing to live an isolatory life of salt milling and fishing. Their lives are free of all the capitalistic consumeristic materialistic poisons destroying most of the world, so why introduce those trappings there? It's a double-edged sword, local inhabitants doing all the hard work is colonialist exploitation and must be stopped but "stopped" really means "replaced by machines" and we know that really means all the trappings of the west are unleashed into a purely natural traditional environment, and two of those trapping (industrialization, environmental degradation) visually punctuate the end of the film. Many challenging issues raised in Araya. A bounty of issues that are dominating the social/political spectrum right now.

10/10

...............................................Clouds
...........................................Ocean Sky
.......................................Sun Land Heat Sand
...................................Cellular Swirls DNA Pools
..............................Waves Weeds Gulls Cacti Rocks
.........................Sea Froth Sea Shells Sea Clay Sea Cells
....................Fortress Pearls Corals Glowing White Salt Cones
...............Starfish Scales Salt Ulcers Seashell Cemetary Salineros
..........Pre-Programmed Synchronistic Factoryline Clockwork Gestures
.....Uninterrupted Heredity Non-Evolutionary Anthropogenical Messianical
..Machination Marginalization Dehumanization Human Deprivation Pharmakonic



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Wow! What a great, thoughtful post. (And visually artistic, too.) I wouldn't even try to expand upon it, because it really says it all.

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits. -- A. Einstein

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