Discover the poetics of salt, where art, memory, and migration transform our understanding of this everyday substance.

While histories of salt have long emphasized its central role in trade, power, and capitalism, is that the only way to understand this everyday substance? In Salted Earth, artist and researcher Katy Beinart offers a fresh perspective, exploring the poetics of salt. Through a series of journeys to South Africa, Lithuania and Russia, Portugal, and Haiti, Beinart and her collaborators investigate the everyday rituals and cultural meanings of salt in diverse contexts. In her work, salt becomes a medium through which large-scale histories of migration, trade, empire, slavery, and colonialism—as well as deeply personal relationships, emotional geographies, memory, and intercultural connections—are symbolized and reimagined.

Drawing on fiction, poetry, and visual art, alongside family history, travel writing, trade archives, and artistic process, Beinart builds a rich, interdisciplinary portrait of salt as both a material and a cultural symbol. These journeys and embodied artistic practices open a sensorial and situated way of understanding material entanglements, where knowledge emerges through movement, encounter, and acts of making. Salted Earth offers valuable insights for students and researchers in art, creative writing, cultural history and geography, memory studies, and across the wider fields of aesthetics and the humanities.

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Note on Translation and Terms

Prologue

Introduction: In Search of Salted Earth

Departure and return

The poetics of salt

Diasporic artistic mobilities

Sites and relations – Artistic practices

1. Journey to South Africa (and Back): Don’t Look Back (2010)/Memory Preservation Salts (2011)

Part 1: Journey to South Africa

Part 2: Memory Preservation Salts (2011) (return)

2. Journey to Eastern Europe (and back): Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt (2012)

Part 1: Journey to Eastern Europe

Part 2: Brixton Dinners (return)

3. Journey to Portugal (and Back): Salinas/Saltworks (2013)

Part 1: Journey to Portugal

Part 2: Saltworks (return)

4. Journey to Haiti (and Back): Goute Sel/A Taste of Salt (2013)

Part 1: Journey to Haiti

Part 2: Salt residues (return)

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index