Negra-Blanca-Negra, Spain: Salt

Shot in Salinas, the ancient family-owned salt mine, I am invoking my family’s history as brutally exiled Sephardic Jews, an economic “conduit” throughout the Middle Ages. Life (people, the natural world) became an economic transaction. As with “natural resources,” people become disposable when you run out of need for that “resource.” In Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, my cross-cultural, climate justice book and animation, salt is a central character. Here in the Salinas mine in Spain, I photograph my vulnerable Sephardic body at the edge of the salt-encrusted quick sand. The Latin words for ‘salt’ and ‘wisdom’ are the same. Salt itself is an amazing symbol of what we can do when we work together; salt is a symbol of conviviality, of working together for the most fertile kinds of transformation. The combined elements of salt form a truly wondrous team, but on their own, they can be lethal! The compound salt is a combination of sodium (Na+) and chlorine (Cl-). When combined the two elements stabilize one another. Individually, they are potentially deadly: sodium is extremely unstable in its pure form, an easily combustible metal, while chlorine is a poisonous, lethal gas. Like salt as a co-constitutive relationship, my imagery incites embodied interdepencies.