Extract from Salutary Estrangement Notes on the exhibition “A Blind Spot” by Christopher Pinney in Berlin Documentary Forum Magazine Recall Genet as he is voiced in “Le Sphinx” marking the difference between photography’s flatness and his experience walking in Chatila and Sabra as akin to a “game of hopscotch”. “I stepped over bodies as one crosses chasms” he writes later. This question of movement in relation to experience and to the image, and more precisely the image as constructed through a pathway of movement is engaged by Melik Ohanian’s “DAYS : I See What I Saw and What I Will See”, which enacts something akin to an Anabasis for the railway age. Film and railroads have run on “parallel tracks” since the Lumière Brothers.21 Cinema’s appropriation from the railway age of miniaturized dolly track was conventionally used to invisibilize the process of producing the smooth tracking shot. The infrastructure of track guaranteed the absence of those erratic signs that might inadvertently betray the fact that we were looking through a moving camera. Foregrounding what he terms a “labor camp” in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, it is natural that Ohanian should make hyper-visible the – “labored” –material conditions of the moving image – 100 meters of track which the camera smoothly negotiates in four minutes each day. These tracks were then dismantled and reinstalled to permit the onward progression of the camera, past aggregate yards, factories, and workers’ temporary housing. Filmed over 11 days and nights the end product was 1,100 meters of movement unfurled over 42 minutes of time.