What does this teach us from a broader perspective, and also what does it say about the the water body and cultures that formed around it?
In this inquiry we will carefully follow Salt Traces...
This online show explores forms of being with the sea given its distance and nearness—geographical, epistemic, and emotional—both in relation to a homeland or water body that cannot be fully grasped, and yet is always present....
On Nearness and Distance, (In)accessibility, Culture(s) of the (Water) Body
There are times we feel like the Caspian is definitely disappearing and that’s too hard to prevent- so then we title our talk Solastalgia for the Caspian Sea, referring to Glenn Albrecht’s term and expressing a feeling of distress caused by environmental degradation.
Photo collab with Rashad Yusifov
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~........
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Photo collab with Rashad Yusifov
There are times where we choose to be more speculative believing that another future is possible.
Photo collab with Rashad Yusifov
Whenever we had the chance to be on the shores of the Caspian we engaged with people, fishermen and residents of houses nearby the sea to weave in their daily practices and engagements with the sea into the stories that we are assembling.
At the same time we are not often in contact with the Caspian anymore- so for us it’s hard to engage with it slowly. We rather process our thoughts and emotions at a lingering pace.
These are integrated into our newsletters.
Newsletter is a very expandable format and it mirrors well the interdisciplinary nature of our practice.
In our newsletter we also always try to build an intimate connection with the reader- by asking questions, giving prompts of actions such as closing your eyes and holding a seashell to your ear to hear the sound of the sea.
At times we imagine the Caspian not as a passive backdrop but as
a sentient presence, one that records extraction, absorbs pollution, and actively responds.
Beyond Earth as life-force, we recall Tiamat, the
primordial salty ocean,
​
mother of all beings,
whose divided body gave birth to the world.
We refer to water as origin, multiplicity, and primordial force, the site of creation and dissolution.
Through Salt Traces, we work with water's horizontality and participation, gathering the embodied knowledge to make the sea's aliveness perceptible.
....also inviting stories from communities beyond the Caspian
DEVELOPED BY DUMASTAR
And alongside it we keep gestures of care, it could be hands holding, sorting or preparing food because they remind us that the sea is lived with many living beings.
Recently, just before the lecture on our practice in Städelschule, a song came to our minds and we very naturally hummed its melody in unison. It was a song about oilmen, a vestige of Soviet industrialisation resurfaced in our post-Soviet memory. The lyrics go: "We are four friends, four comrades, we have the same dreams...and the blue sea is bowing to us." In a manner of fighting and transcending nature through productivity and exploitation, this was a song about oilmen working on the Caspian oil rigs, a product of the century-long history reflected in the wonderful Azerbaijani film "BÉ™xtiyar" (1955, directed by Latif Safarov).
​
Everything began with shoreline identity, that is where the urge came from.
It yet again reminded us that Salt Traces was created to forge alternative parallel narratives, rooted in everyday practices, and food was an accessible and multilayered prism for telling those stories.
The decline in the conditions and levels of the Caspian sea is the result of economic and anthropogenic activity.
Recognizing how this ideology of the sea bowing to human productivity shaped the place we were born and brought us together through shared history, we chose a different gesture: to bow back, to the Caspian, to the life it sustained, to the people along its shores. Storytelling here is not merely oral but written, collaged, recorded, published, because what is recorded stands a chance of remaining. The flattening the question fears is not a future risk but a present reality: hegemonic knowledge systems already render these shoreline identities marginal or invisible.
Salt Traces does not resolve this, it destabilises it, by merely existing.
Operating on the premise that art's role is to formulate a problem from a fresh angle we are asking ourselves:
What if we talk about the localities and histories around a certain water body through our mum’s recipe book- where does it lead us?
What if we start looking into mythology around the fruits that grow in the lands around the sea?
How does that expand the sea and helps us to see it as part of the broader ecosystem?
What if we try to come to terms that love for the sea at a very emotional level isn’t unconditional- what does it tell about our ability to care?
So for us it’s about going into the periphery in order to tell the holistic story of what is central to our thinking and practice. And we are slowly expanding it beyond focusing only on the Caspian to bringing the approach of perceiving, contemplating and storytelling to other water bodies.
[...]the sea [...] weaves together the past, present and future[...]
