It’s 2199, in the desertificated Budapest. The former Pannonian Sea has become a deadly salt flat. We have exceeded utopias and got bored with dystopias. We need new aesthetic codes. But how to be an outsider after so many future-shocks? Art in itself is alchemy, an ensemble of occult sorcery and mystical rites. The hermetic triangle of body, mind and spirit: magical transmutation of physical sensations, conceptual contents and psychic impressions into aesthetic experiences. A forever interacting sublimation of materials, ideas and feelings. This exhibition is an exploratory and experimental assemblage of world-building and speculative fiction. The displayed artworks try to capture an alternative way of thinking and feeling about the future, opposed to contemporary cyberpunk-postdigital dystopias and solarpunk-ecological utopias.
The exhibition is an environment-like space, a journey into the future by aesthetic experiences and free associations based on a lore (background story) that have been published earlier for the visitors. The offsite venue in the heart of Budapest was a haloterapeutical cellar once. Now it is out of use. In our after-the-future saltworld, it is a safe-heaven for scavenger partisans, a secret alchemy laboratory and an antiquities shop for the collected goods and parts. Life is harsh on the salty sand dunes. The ruined city is raided so many times that the few survivors have seek shelter underground. People make a living by mining and processing salt from the scorched earth, while youngsters organize junkcar races in the dried riverbed of the Danube. Saltpunks are the people who try to survive in these rugged conditions, but the term also refers to an aesthetic and political genre, like cyberpunk. The immersive, atmospherical space and the fragmental nature of the exhibited found-like objects make the visitors create their own narratives and stories about this imagined world.
Salt is a paradoxical phenomenon, both as matter and metaphor. In medieval alchemy salt symbolizes the body and the earth and used to conservate or stabilize mixtures. It can also be the allegory for the “Philosopher’s Stone” or eternal wisdom and existence. It is an essential substance for almost all kinds of biological lifeform on Earth. But at the same time, salt can be deadly in greater amounts. A perfect example of the Greek “pharmakon”. Salt is a condition of life, and also a lethal material. Salt can preserve bodies, conservate states and conditions, but simultaneously annihilate life. Salt can help us to examine and incorporate paradoxes. We should accept and embrace contradictions because our very own life and reality is full of them.
-Written by Bertalan Eged
