Salt Cartographies II Toronto

Salt, being a mineral, essential for life, still exerts a symbology of values, either positive and negative, developed in different cultures. My approach to it in this project comes from its relevant roll in the economical transactions in human history: salt as a currency, salt as gift, salt as salary, or salt as punishment and destruction. Currently salt’s roll is reduced to health, culinary and others concerns, but it remains latent of references or metaphors to the elusive processes of physical and human realities: change, transformation, formation, disintegration, entropy, catastrophe and regeneration.

Salt, as we know it commonly, granulated, shapeless, is a material which offers its physical qualities for an active meditative work of reflection on human realities, specially when they have overpassed the limits of our understanding. Nevertheless, this is an attempt to start to look at it through the new perspectives created by the artwork itself.

Through the fundamental act of life, which is breathing, a minimalist dynamic of transformation is put on work over the salt. Breathing as repetition, as the skeleton of human time, structures the process of an idea, which may expand in multiple meanings or synthesise in one final form.

This durational performance is a cartographic work of memory and reflections focus on the past and the present of an overwhelming contextual reality of tragic events close to me: the actual reality of Mexico in the North American economic context.

Elvira Santamaria 2018