SALT
Commission 2022 - 23
Read "We will all be marine animals soon" by Rowan Lear on Map Mag, a response to I looked out and saw plumes of salted air.
Read on Map Magazine's website
AT FIRST, AND THEN (2023)
15 minute, single channel film with sound (above)
A speculative fiction work set in a salty world, at first, and then is a collage of photographs, moving image and sound. Part of a continuing project looking at a future, world, parallel, time alternate, dimension, through a salted lens, set in an over salinated beach town. With a queer approach and a nod to 1960s French new wave cinema, the work layers a 35 voice choir with crawling digital sounds, harking to sci-fis from the past projecting somewhere into the future.
Camera, editing and sound by Joanne Matthews with production and editing assistance from Kathryn Cutler-Mackenzie.
The work was exhibited at Mote102 23 - 30 March 2023 and screened on Map Magazine from July - August 2023.
I LOOKED OUT AND SAW PLUMES OF SALTY AIR (2022)
Salt cast sculptures, poetry pamphlet (below)
Across two sites, salt cast sculptures, suggestive of remnants from a speculative salted world. There was also a performative reading of an extract from a larger text, setting up the world I am inhabiting for my SALT residency.
Photos by Ellie McMaster
BACKGROUND
Starting from Joppa Salt Pans, a former site of fossil-fuel-powered salt production, the work explores connections between capitalism, rising sea levels, and over-salination. As glaciers melt and heat evaporates water, the seas have changed.
This commission involved testing speculative fictional environments in order to transform neoliberal apocalyptic narratives of doom and find hope in the dark.
Weaving narratives from this parallel reality, a salt world is being created. The work asks: how might bodies evolve to live with so much salt? And what could crystallised artifacts from this salty future look like? Emerging from this salt world are objects, film, poetry, and voice – each a tool for exploration, love, emergence, and identity.
Hanna Tuulikki has been providing dramaturgical support, and production support from Kathryn Cutler-Mackenzie.