Essays on Salt–Sedimentary Archives

Lindabrunn, Austria

Cubo

Salt, conglomerate rock, mirror, cables, speakers, sound.

Sound collaboration with Basel Nouri.

Essays on Salt–Sedimentary Archives is a site-specific installation that brings elements of the Lindabrunn landscape, formed billions of years ago as conglomerate rock, into the Cubo to activate a conversation with salt.

This conglomerate-salt landscape evokes material memories of ancient times, embedded in these two rock formations from different geological eras yet connected by ancient seas.

This work invites materials and humans to approach time, deep time, and our relationships with landscapes and their formations. The salt crystallisation of the windows was achieved using various salts and by manipulating environmental conditions within the Cubo, in an attempt to replicate deep-time geological processes and to make sense of geological time scales that are almost impossible for the human mind to conceive.

Ancient cultures regarded rocks, mountains, and seas as ancestors, sustaining the life, memory, and wisdom of places as they had been before humans, as they should remain to the future.