Salt & Paper

Colonies, Memory, and the Quiet Labor of Minerals

Salt entered my life long before it entered my work.

I grew up near the Mediterranean Sea, surrounded by light, movement, and a sense of openness. And yet, the place that shaped my way of seeing the world was elsewhere — at the lowest point on Earth. The Dead Sea. A landscape that does not behave like a landscape. A place where scale collapses, where time thickens, where the body becomes acutely aware of itself.

The Dead Sea always felt closer to the moon than to anything terrestrial. Sinkholes open like lunar craters. Cracked earth exposes layers of accumulated pressure. Vast white expanses are interrupted by sudden ruptures. The surface records everything. Nothing is erased. Every impact remains visible.

As a child, I did not experience this environment as “nature.” I experienced it as surface, exposure, and condition. The moon was already present there — not as an image, but as a logic. Circularity. Repetition. Scar tissue. A body marked by collisions rather than healed by time. A surface that refuses erasure.

The Dead Sea changes perception. The air is heavy, saturated with minerals. Breathing feels physical. Smell becomes tactile. The surrounding mountains compress the space, creating an enclosure that feels almost architectural. Without a space suit, the body is immediately vulnerable. The heat offers no escape. The terrain is sharp. The ground cuts. Every step requires attention. Everything has the potential to hurt.

And yet, life insists.

Small oases appear unexpectedly. Fresh water breaks through salt-heavy ground. Date palms grow where they should not. Mineral geysers erupt and disappear. The landscape is harsh and generous at the same time — violent and healing, threatening and protective. This contradiction became foundational to my understanding of material.

For me, the Dead Sea became a place of safety. Not comfort — but safety. A quiet, radical safety rooted in stillness. A place where the absence of distraction sharpens perception. A place where you cannot drown. A place where salt grows slowly, relentlessly, forming massive crystal colonies over time. A place where nothing pretends to be neutral.

I returned there again and again. For weeks at a time. Often alone. As a child, and later as a young man. I did not collect. I did not produce. I observed. I stayed. I learned through the body — through endurance, through touch, through waiting. A moon-walker on Earth, already tracing topographies that would later reappear in my work.

Salt as Condition, Not Material

As an adult, I returned to the Dead Sea consciously moving in and out of a space suit. Artist. Observer. Researcher. Survivor. The separation between these roles never felt necessary.

Salt, in this environment, is unavoidable. It is not a material you choose — it is a condition you enter. It coats skin, settles into clothing, crystallizes on surfaces, dissolves, collapses, reforms. Even in moments of apparent stillness, everything is active. Salt migrates. Salt reacts. Salt remembers.

This is where my material research began — not as a project, not as a plan, but out of proximity and curiosity. A need to understand how things happen. Why structures form. How systems build themselves. How they fail. How they return in altered states.

The Dead Sea is not static. It is a system shaped by evaporation cycles, seasonal shifts, tectonic movement, pressure, heat, and excess. Everything there is the result of continuous manipulation — natural manipulation. Salt builds and destroys simultaneously. Surfaces harden, fracture, dissolve, and reappear. Construction and destruction are inseparable.

Over time, this observation reshaped how I understand material. Not as outcome, but as duration. Not as fixed form, but as condition. Salt taught me to work with instability. With saturation. With repetition. With time. To accept erosion as structure. To recognize pressure, accumulation, and even pain as formative forces.

Salt is not passive. It does not wait for instruction. It follows rules — but not intention.

Paper as Skin, Surface, and Archive

Paper entered this dialogue naturally.

Paper is often treated as neutral — a support, a background, a carrier. In my practice, paper is never neutral. It is skin. It is surface. It is archive. It records pressure, incision, touch, hesitation, repetition. Like the moon’s surface, paper remembers everything that happens to it.

Paper and salt share a fundamental sensitivity. Both absorb. Both react. Both record. Paper holds fibers the way salt holds minerals — through accumulation rather than cohesion. Neither material hides its history. Damage remains visible. Repair never erases.

Working with paper allows time to slow down. It creates a space where repetition becomes a form of thinking. Stitching becomes mapping. Piercing becomes marking. Threads become pathways — not decorative, but structural. When salt enters this system, it does not decorate the paper. It colonizes it.

Colonization here is not a metaphor chosen lightly.

Salt colonies grow when conditions allow repetition, attachment, and continuity. They expand. They collapse. They rebuild. They appear stable and then fail. This behavior mirrors human systems — social, political, psychological — without illustration, without narration. The material performs the logic.

Paper becomes terrain. Threads become infrastructure. Salt becomes population. Growth is never guaranteed. Collapse is never final.

Memory, Labor, and Repetition

Nothing about this work is fast.

Salt requires waiting. Paper requires labor. Stitching demands repetition. Crystallization demands patience. This slowness is not romantic. It is necessary. It creates a space where observation replaces control.

Repetition, in this context, is not about efficiency. It is about attention. Each stitch is a decision. Each return to the solution is a negotiation. Each failure becomes information rather than loss.

Salt does not follow desire. It follows conditions.

This is why I do not apply salt. I enter a system where salt is allowed to act. The work emerges from a dialogue rather than a command. From exposure rather than mastery.

There is an ethics in this approach. An acceptance that material has agency. That not everything can be fixed, preserved, or stabilized. That some things must remain vulnerable to remain truthful.

Salt, History, and Human Weight

Salt has accompanied humanity since the earliest civilizations. It preserved food, defined trade routes, marked borders, fueled economies, justified conquest. Entire cities were built around it. Entire conflicts were shaped by it. Salt is never innocent.

To work with salt is to work with history — geological and political. Salt carries memory not only of place, but of use. Of extraction. Of labor. Of survival. Of scarcity and excess.

In this sense, salt is never abstract. It arrives already charged. Already shaped by human need and geological time.

Paper, too, carries weight. It is tied to documentation, bureaucracy, contracts, borders, archives. Paper records decisions. Paper legitimizes power. Paper stores memory in fragile form.

When salt meets paper, these histories collide.

The Moon as Logic, Not Image

The moon remains central — not as symbol, but as structure of thought.

Its surface is white not because it is pure, but because it is scarred. It holds every impact it has ever received. Nothing disappears. Everything is recorded. This logic — surface as memory, material as witness — runs through my work.

The moon is a body shaped by repetition, collision, and time. So is paper. So is salt.

Working with these materials means accepting that nothing is ever finished. Only paused. Only temporarily stabilized. The work exists in a suspended state — between growth and collapse, between presence and erosion.

Everyday Materials, Radical Attention

Salt and paper are everyday materials. They are accessible. Familiar. Often overlooked. And yet, they carry immense complexity.

Their power lies not in rarity, but in behavior.

They invite curiosity. They reward patience. They resist domination. They demand respect. Working with them becomes a form of listening rather than speaking.

This practice is not about spectacle. It is about attention. About staying long enough for something to happen. About recognizing that the quiet labor of minerals mirrors our own — slow, repetitive, often invisible, yet deeply formative.

Salt and paper are not metaphors I apply. They are systems I enter.

And in doing so, I continue a conversation that began long ago — in a landscape that felt closer to the moon than to Earth, where surface, memory, and time are inseparable.

Coda

Nothing here aims for resolution.

Salt continues to grow. Paper continues to absorb. Colonies form and collapse. Memory remains incomplete. The work stays open.

This openness is not a weakness. It is the condition.