A golden moon hangs over a serpentine, aquatic landscape. A liminal blend of salt and fresh water on the edge of the Adriatic Sea, the Venetian lagoon exudes an uncanny, ancient stillness. Even today, if you take a boat out at dawn, its salt marshes can feel prehistoric. Yet this morning women are moving gracefully through the eerie wetlands that are one of our most precious environmental resources.
The women lie on, embrace, inhale and harvest the hardy plants that carpet the marshes. Entwined with their oasis, one group, wearing white dresses, pause to look behind them. Resembling architectural columns, their stance suggests both longing and determination. It is as if they are imprinting the scene on to their mind’s eye for transmission to future generations.
Lasting just seven minutes, the film just described is only one element of Salt of the Earth, which also encompasses an installation, a choral piece and a performance.
The work will premiere in a private view on September 6, with a public performance the following day, in a former salt warehouse in Venice. In this dramatic location — the 19th-century building gazes across the Giudecca waterfront — a cavernous chamber with lofty brick walls topped by wooden beams will be filled with mounds of salt. It is the backdrop to the performance by Irish actor Olwen Fouéré and to a requiem, for many of Venice’s salt marshes are no more, sung by a local community choir and created by renowned British composer Isobel Waller-Bridge.
Acting as an impassioned call to protect the world’s salt marshes, the first crystal of Salt of the Earth formed when its director Sophie Hunter visited the warehouse while working on another project.
Talking to me from London on Zoom during a break in rehearsals for Fouéré’s performance, Hunter recalls how the evocative architecture of the salt warehouse “really spoke to me”.
Having worked in London’s West End and on Broadway, Hunter, a playwright, theatre director and former actress, is acclaimed for creating risky, cross-disciplinary productions such as Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra, which she directed in a castle in Northern Ireland. Attuned to the warehouse’s historic heartbeat, Hunter researched its history as a deposit for a mineral fundamental to Venice’s economic and ecological survival since the city’s origins.
In truth, salt marshes are crucial to the planet, capturing up to 50 times more carbon than rainforests, protecting us from rising sea levels and acting as havens for flora and fauna. Yet around 50 per cent of the world’s salt marshes have already disappeared. By 2100, without significant intervention, almost all will have vanished beneath the water.
The Venetian salt marshes, known as barene, act as natural barriers against flooding and erosion, but they are vulnerable to rising sea levels, decreased sediment, wind waves, motondoso (waves from shipping traffic) and even the new system of flood barriers known as MOSE. Created to protect Venice from catastrophic storm surges, ironically MOSE menaces the salt marshes by significantly reducing sediment. “If the barene don’t receive enough sediment, they can’t keep pace with increasing sea levels,” explains Andrea D’Alpaos, a professor of hydrology at Padua University, who advised Hunter as she conceived Salt of the Earth.
D’Alpaos is just one of a host of local experts with whom Hunter has collaborated. Others include We Are Here Venice (WahV), an NGO focused on the environmental and social health of the city.
Accustomed to international artists working on Venice but understanding little of the specific challenges, WahV co-founder, environmental scientist Jane da Mosto, was glad Hunter wanted Salt of the Earth to be “of real relevance”. Funds from Hunter’s project will help WahV’s educational programme run excursions into the lagoon to reconnect young people with the wetlands’ vital role, a topic until now “sadly neglected”, says da Mosto, by the school curriculum.
The lagoon’s landscape also enraptured Hunter. Recalling the moment when d’Alpaos took her out on to the lagoon for the first time, last January, she says: “It was freezing cold; the salt marshes were just tufts of grass. But he told me different anecdotes and by the time [he finished], those tufts just seemed the most precious thing.”
Hunter started to muse on the notion of Lot’s wife, the figure in Genesis who was turned to a pillar of salt when she looked back at Sodom as she fled with her family. Rather than a “punitive” experience, Hunter wondered if the story could evoke an “act of bearing witness, of testimony”.
Hunter asked Megan Hunter, her sister-in-law and the author of The End We Start From, a novel about motherhood and climate change, to write a script that would reinterpret the story from a more compassionate perspective.
Appearing on the same Zoom screen, Megan Hunter explains that her task was to create a “point of connection” between the audience and lagoon. “It’s about falling in love with a landscape,” she explains.
Her script, performed by Fouéré, includes lines such as: “We live at the end of the world/I wanted to give my daughters marsh names/Spartina, Salicornia, Sarcocornia.”
That final line conjures three of the plants — cordgrass, samphire and glasswort in English — that flourish in the marshes’ salty soil. Hunter was introduced to this hardy flora by another Venetian organisation, The Tidal Garden. Specialising in raising awareness of the edible potential of the lagoon’s salt-tolerant plants, The Tidal Garden assists local farmers to adapt their crops as rising sea levels and other environmental changes make the Veneto fields increasingly salty.
“We want to give our terrains a new language, a new vocabulary, one that is about possibility and potential rather than loss” explains Tidal Garden researcher and designer Lodovica Guarnieri when I ask her what drew them to the Salt of the Earth project. They hope their collaboration will be the beginning of a long-term partnership with the international team.
The final molecule in Salt of the Earth’s multi-faceted structure is the musical score by Waller-Bridge. Speaking from New York, the composer recalls that finding herself working with a Venetian community choir “of different ranges and abilities”, she decided to write a piece that was “not intimidating” but which would nevertheless act as an “incantation . . . almost calling something into being”.
The result is a requiem whose deceptive simplicity is in synergy with the spare power of the overall work, acting not only as an elegy but also as a celebration of the salt marshes’ still vital anima.
Despite its profoundly Venetian footprint, Salt of the Earth will not halt at the shores of the Adriatic. “We hope to take [it] to as many places with salt marshes as possible,” Sophie Hunter explains, adding that she will always adapt the work through collaboration with “local partners”. Her hope is to create an “emotional connection” to these rare, valuable environments. “We want to pull people out of apathy and despair,” she continues. “To show that they truly have a voice — and that there is hope.”
Public performance of ‘Salt of the Earth’ on September 7, saltoftheearth.earth
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