Saline Ecologies: artistic salt practices at the edges of body, object and land

Saline Ecologies: artistic salt practices at the edges of body, object and land is an 18-month programme of events that explores how artistic and sensory practices with salt can offer interdisciplinary understandings of changing social, cultural and environmental ecologies. The programme is funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and is a partnership between the University of Brighton, Teeside University, the New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) at the Universita Ca’Foscari and Hastings Contemporary, a gallery in Hastings, UK.

Globally, traces of salt in landscapes, language, food and rituals reveal its unique historic role in global trade, migration, colonialism and slavery (Kurlansky 2003; Nimako and Willemsen 2011; Glissant 1960;1998). Salty seas and the edges where land meets sea hold molecular evidence of both historic and future changes to human and more-than-human ecologies (Petanidou 2005; Sharpe 2016; Gould et al 2021; Olson et al 2022).

The conceptual framework of saline ecologies and edges offers an interdisciplinary understanding of ecologies, and ‘edges’ as the literal edges between land and water; other edges where salinity meets body/object/building; and also edges where different disciplines, concepts, places, pasts and presents, meet through salt. Salt has the ability to act as a conduit or analogy that can hold disparate meanings, experiences and worldviews, even those in opposition. Salt is simultaneously healing and corrosive, tangible and elusive, sacred and everyday (Jones et al 1995). Using five conceptual physical and poetic qualities of salt (dissolving, extracting, preserving, saturating, crystallising), this project will build knowledge through sited, sensory and affective collaborative research methods to examine how postcolonial memories of extractive histories can be retold, and related to current debates on ecological, societal and cultural transformation, and how we can reframe our relationship to environmental crisis and ecological changes.

The project is structured through the salt-related themes: dissolving, extracting, preserving, saturating and crystallising. Each theme corresponds with an event, and each event will contain both an interdisciplinary academic dialogue and an artistic practice-based workshop, working with salt, and led by one of the core team with invited artist practitioners also contributing. The final event, Saturating, will be a conference at the University of Brighton. The final stage, Crystallising, will produce project outputs will including a special issue of NICHE’s journal Lagoonscapes, podcast series, project website and future funding bids.