The short essay film “The Literal Zone: Exhibits A-J” is Andrej Slávik’s first foray into the terrain of (audio)visual historiography. Consisting of ten brief episodes (or ‘exhibits’), each focussing on a highly cicumscribed event, the piece revolves around the figure of the refugee as it has been constituted throughout modern history, juxtaposing the recent – in fact, ongoing – so-called refugee crisis with what migration scholars have recently begun to describe as a “forty-years’ crisis” in the beginning and middle of the 20th century (ca. 1919–59).
“Andrej Slávik's film is an immersion in the restless archive of found footage, in which the images transcend their representational roles. Various spatial and temporal zones are layered together with distinctive narrations, whose lines disturb the unilinear interpretation of the visual material.” – Lea Vene, curator
2018 | HD video | B&W and color | sound (various languages with English subtitles) | 5:28
