City Of Salt
Italo Calvino once wrote about a city where all connections, real and imagined, were traced out with different colored yarns, from building to building, person to person, and object to object. This had the secondary effect of turning the city into one giant knot, impassible to all who were unable to ignore these relationships made tangible.
All cities are knots of connections, as are all networks. These huge accumulations function precisely because of the connections from one element to another, not in spite of them. Cities gain their character because of the links between the different parts. Sometimes this is mapped out and becomes a part of a city’s normal functions, like a subway or bus line. More often, these connections are left hidden and, through repeated use, become part of a city’s personal or collective mythology.
These connections branch out and inwards, forming an almost living organic being made manifest by creeping layers and time which consume and exhume, leaving traces of individual relationships etched in the rock and soil of a city, like coral fossils endlessly inhabited by unrelated generations.
City of Salt is a metropolis described in photographs, a place that is simultaneously all cities and one imagined city. It is an exploration into the nature of these aggregations of connections – what holds them together and divides them, and the links they share within themselves and with each other. The city as node and the city as fungus and a visual evidence of the network hidden below it.
The city becomes metaphor for our own tangled, globe-spanning knots of relationships; a network made manifest and a creature that consumes, swelling up from below as lines between me and you and us and them catch and snag and agglomerate.