Where Salt Sleeps
The Ethics of Salt
The Ethics of Salt
I. The Memory of the Sea
Even a single crystal carries a memory of the sea.
Salt is the way the sea remembers itself.¹
Water flows, cleanses and forgets.
Together they form the sea.
Salt is the way the sea remembers itself.¹
Water flows, cleanses and forgets.
Salt lingers, remembers and leaves traces.
Together they form the sea.
If water is the movement of time,
salt is that time made solid.
Between motion and stillness, between presence and loss,
the world continually reshapes itself to remain what it is.
salt is that time made solid.
Between motion and stillness, between presence and loss,
the world continually reshapes itself to remain what it is.
This dialogue continues quietly within the human body.
The salinity of our blood, sweat and tears all resemble the primordial sea.
We carry an inner ocean.
To live is to keep its currents in balance:
too little, and the body collapses inward; too much, and it overflows.
Salt teaches the concentration of being,
the art of maintaining one’s own existence.
We mine salt from the ground,
bring it into our bodies,
and return it to the sea through sweat and tears.
Like a language passed through generations,
salt melts, transforms and reforms again.
too little, and the body collapses inward; too much, and it overflows.
Salt teaches the concentration of being,
the art of maintaining one’s own existence.
We mine salt from the ground,
bring it into our bodies,
and return it to the sea through sweat and tears.
Like a language passed through generations,
salt melts, transforms and reforms again.
One form of this history took shape in the late eighteenth century with the construction of Salinas del Carmen³, an artificial saltpan built as part of the island’s modest yet vital salt economy. A saltpan is more than an industrial site: it is a slow machine operated jointly by climate and human labour. Atlantic water enters the shallow ponds, dry winds from Africa strip the water away, and the sun leaves a thin crust of salt. Humans guide the flow, but the moment of crystallisation ultimately belongs to nature.
Salt was not merely a preservative but a form of survival in a land shaped by drought, scarcity and migration. It entered local trade routes, fed the island’s economy, and influenced its politics. And while many European salt industries collapsed in the mid-twentieth century, Salinas del Carmen continued to operate with quiet persistence, kept alive by human hands and the climate that insists on crystallisation.
Here, salt carries not only the memory of the sea but the memory of labour, dryness, and movement, a mineral archive of what the island has endured.
II. The Language of Boundaries
Salt is born upon a boundary on the thin membrane between sea and land, life and nonlife, solidity and flow.
Yet it dismantles the very line that gives it birth.
In the repetition of crystallization and dissolution,
all boundaries slowly melt away.
On the surface of salt lie countless fractures.
There are patterns, but they cannot be called order.
Order is an illusion.
On the floor of the salt fields, I witness human time.
Particles clinging to the fingertips,
the marks of dried water
traces of the sea’s intrusion into the land.
I imagine salt workers’ hands never dry.
They always hold the residue of the sea.
Salt is the point where human labor meets the rhythm of nature,
the smallest unit where relation begins.
They always hold the residue of the sea.
Salt is the point where human labor meets the rhythm of nature,
the smallest unit where relation begins.
The birth of salt holds no ceremony.
It crystallizes by chance through subtle dissonances
of wind and temperature.
Yet that chance may be the most fundamental order of the world.
It is solid, but it knows it will soon dissolve.
It vanishes, yet continues to exist.
In that instability, the world breathes.
The first boundary appears as flor de sal, a delicate film that forms only on calm water under dry wind and steady sunlight. Its thickness never exceeds 0.2 millimetres. It is a surface phenomenon, a fragile skin of the sea. If this thin layer sinks beneath the water, the conditions shift. Over the next 10 to 15 days, the submerged layer thickens into escama a crystalline flake about 1 millimetre in depth. Time changes the structure; the deeper the layer, the more the ions bind, forming heavier forms.
If the flake is left untouched for 30 to 35 days, it becomes sal gruesa, coarse salt shaped by long evaporation. These transitions are slow, predictable only to those who know how to read the ponds. Every phase is harvested by hand. No pumps, no machinery, no refinement. The salt is not processed or treated; it remains entirely natural, shaped only by wind, water, and the labour of the person watching over it.
In this environment, boundaries are not fixed lines but temporal thresholds points at which water, wind and sun conspire to shift the identity of matter. The workers do not extract salt so much as accompany its formation. They recognise when a surface is becoming depth, when a film is thickening into a sheet, when a sheet is about to collapse into grain.
Salt reveals that a boundary is not a separation but a process, a movement between forms, held together briefly before becoming something else.⁶
III. The Art of Disappearance
This is not failure but a way of existing. Salt teaches that disappearance is not the opposite of presence, but a continuation, a relocation, a redistribution. When salt dissolves, it does not die.
It travels. It leaves the boundary it once held and enters another: the air, the pond, the skin, the sea.
In Fuerteventura, where wind and dryness dominate the rhythms of daily life, this cycle becomes especially visible. The same wind that accelerates crystallisation can also erase the crystal’s edges, lifting grains into the air or returning them to the water they had escaped. The salt worker knows this well. They do not fight disappearance, they anticipate it, working with a material that refuses permanence. Their labour is not about preservation but about attention, a way of meeting a substance that exists in continual negotiation with its own undoing.
To think with salt is to accept that stability is brief. A crystal is temporary, a momentary alignment of heat, wind, concentration and time. What seems solid is already in transition. What seems to vanish is already on its way to becoming something else. Salt circulates between states the way memory circulates between bodies, sometimes held, sometimes lost, always returning in another form.
The art of disappearance suggests an ethics. An invitation to live with matter that cannot be possessed, to recognise that loss is not an ending but a reorganisation of relation. Salt shows that everything we touch is in the process of becoming otherwise. It teaches us how to remain connected even as forms dissolve, how to continue living inside what is changing.
Salt is not the by-product of disappearance,
it is disappearance itself, given form.
Transformation is the circulation of being,
and death is only one moment in that circuit.
Nature creates no divisions.
it is disappearance itself, given form.
Transformation is the circulation of being,
and death is only one moment in that circuit.
Nature creates no divisions.
Even when we call it death,
it is merely one state shifting into another.
Salt is not about purification or preservation
but about a way of accepting change.
It holds corrosion and preservation together,
refuses to separate destruction from creation.
Everything melts for a while,
Everything rests for a while.
but about a way of accepting change.
It holds corrosion and preservation together,
refuses to separate destruction from creation.
Everything melts for a while,
Everything rests for a while.
Thus, the ethics of salt⁸
is not an ethics of redemption or perfection
but a technique of living that accepts change
a way to remain in relation even within disappearance.
The sea is neither origin nor end,
but an infinite interior where such distinctions collapse.
There, salt sleeps and wakes again.
Within that order, I lose myself
not to vanish, but to let my shape
fade gently into the world.
Salt passes through me,
and I pass through it.
To not fear disappearance,
I stand within it.
but an infinite interior where such distinctions collapse.
There, salt sleeps and wakes again.
Within that order, I lose myself
not to vanish, but to let my shape
fade gently into the world.
Salt passes through me,
and I pass through it.
To not fear disappearance,
I stand within it.
Perhaps we are all salt
once water,
now form,
soon to return to the sea.
At the end of that circulation,
salt sleeps,
and I stand inside its dream.
once water,
now form,
soon to return to the sea.
At the end of that circulation,
salt sleeps,
and I stand inside its dream.
Interview
The video was recorded on site in April 2025 at Salinas del Carmen, Fuerteventura. All footage was captured in natural light, following the movement of wind, water and crystallisation.
Photography
Eight photographs in the work were taken directly at the salt fields and coastal landscapes of Fuerteventura, documenting textures of flor de sal, escama, sal gruesa and the shifting boundaries between sea, dust and mineral.
Text
The writing draws on dreams recorded while travelling through Fuerteventura, fragments of sleep that later returned as poetic lines. These were woven together with research on salt, the island’s geology, and the rhythms of evaporation to form a hybrid text of diary, poem and essay.
Sound
The sound was created from underwater recordings captured along several coasts of Fuerteventura. These recordings were layered and edited together into an 11-minute track.
All materials were gathered through field visits, interviews with a salt worker, direct observation, and personal notes written on the island.
1. The idea that minerals can “remember” environmental change draws on geoscience research, in which mineral structures and isotopic or magnetic signatures serve as long-term records of past conditions. Certain minerals and sediment layers record environmental fluctuations over centuries to millennia; their structure, isotopic, or magnetic signatures act as a kind of archival memory. Here, “mineral memory” is used metaphorically to refer to matter's archival capacity.
2. Descriptions of desert winds and dust interacting with Fuerteventura are informed by climatological and geological studies that document long-range Saharan dust transport and deposition on the island over time.
3. Historical information on Salinas del Carmen is based on archives and public material from the Fuerteventura Salt Museum.
4. The terms flor de sal, escama and sal gruesa are used in various Iberian and Atlantic saltworks to distinguish a thin, delicate surface layer from thicker and coarser crystals forming below. In Salinas del Carmen, the approximate time spans mentioned in the text are based on interviews and field observations; in practice, the exact duration of each phase varies with local climate, wind and humidity.
5. Phrases such as “quality over quantity” and other remarks about harvesting practice are drawn from conversations with salt workers at Salinas del Carmen in April 2025 and have been rephrased poetically in the text.
6. The discussion of “boundaries” as processes rather than fixed lines resonates with ecological and materialist philosophies that emphasise zones of transition, thresholds and ongoing transformation instead of stable separations.
7. The description of crystals forming, dissolving and reappearing is grounded in the observable behaviour of salt in the ponds, where changes in humidity, temperature and salinity continuously move matter between solid and liquid states.
8. The idea of an “ethics of salt” is the author’s own conceptual proposal, developed from observing cyclical salt formation in Fuerteventura and reflecting on how materials persist through change rather than in static forms.