Poster
Détour and Retour: Practices and poetics of salt as narratives of relation and re-generation in Brixton
Drawing on the work of Martiniquan poet Edouard Glissant and his ‘poetics of Relation’ (1990), this practice-based PhD explores how salt features in relationships of migration and change in urban places, in particular the context of Brixton, an area of London with a strong migrant identity.
Following Glissant’s notion of détour and retour, this thesis moves between geographical locations through a series of four narrative journeys from Brixton, outwards to South Africa, Eastern Europe, Portugal, and Haiti, returning each time to Brixton as a ‘homeplace’. Each chapter is arranged as a détour and retour, developing a practice and poetics of salt that offers a productive reading of Brixton’s current regeneration.
I explore salt’s use in offering forms of protection, preservation and reawakening through re-enacting rituals found in everyday and religious practices from across different diasporas. I engage with auto-ethnographic research into my family history and Jewish cultural customs around salt, as well as engage with others’ stories and salt products that link to specific places through migration. Using practices that perfomatively engage with the materiality of salt, I build on work by artists including Robert Smithson and Sigalit Landau.
Overall, this thesis argues that practices and poetics of salt can be linked to processes of migration and regeneration. The thesis shows how salt practices can be used to understand the particular poetics of salt and how salt acts as an index in artworks that point to ideas of migration and diaspora. These material and poetic qualities of salt make it a rich vehicle for alternative approaches to regeneration, particularly in sites such as Brixton. I argue for a re-negotiation of the language of regeneration of these sites, instead proposing a ‘poetics of re-generation’ through a re-reading of Glissant’s terms of détour and retour as well as his poetics of Relation.
I propose an understanding of a place as formed through relational processes. I therefore discuss the journey, a physical détour, as an artistic method of understanding a place, by going outside the place itself. The journeys in this thesis enable an understanding of how material culture shifts through movement, and they are a means of finding and constructing languages of movement that can be brought back to place. […]
I decided that, through the process of the thesis, the making of salt artworks, and the reflective writing on these works, I would aim to understand salt as a practice. In order to research Brixton’s diasporas, I made a series of journeys which connected with salt products found in Brixton to their sites of production elsewhere. These journeys, or détours, became the central structuring device of the thesis. They allowed me to make connections between the local and the diasporic, using journeying and story-telling to make links between Brixton and related places elsewhere. These physical journeys enabled me to make détours from Brixton, to discover the poetics of Relation in the diasporic links through salt, and to bring these narratives back to Brixton through the practice of retour.
The journeys I made are at the heart of my salt practice, and they are framed by my understanding of Glissant’s concept of the poetics of Relation and the interlinked journeying of détour and retour. […]
Through […] three types of journeys, I set out the […] four projects (chapters) which develop a salting practice in the détour and return to questions of regeneration in Brixton in the retour. These journeys are the basis on which I build my argument for a poetics of re-generation that uses salting practice as a poetic and material case study. […]
Contents
Abstract 5
List of images 11
List of abbreviations 14
Acknowledgements 15
Prologue 19
Introduction: In search of salted earth 23
Questions and aims of the thesis 32
The journey as structuring device: Détour and Retour 34
Structure of the thesis 37
Part I 41
Section 1: Salting practices: A ‘poetics of Relation’ 43
The Poetics of Salt 47
The poetics of salt in art practice 52
A poetics of the index 58
Towards a ‘poetics of Relation’ 65
Section 2: Journeys and narratives of Détour and Retour 75
Détour and retour 78
Migrations and diasporas 84
Travel, journey and pilgrimage 88
(Home) place and entanglement 91
Regeneration 96
Brixton 100
Section 3: Salting practices in Brixton 109
Practice-based research 112
Site- and place-specificity 116
Writing (and travelling) 123
Practising Brixton: Performance, ritual, re-making 126
Salting practices 129
Part II 135
Project 1: Journey to South Africa (and back): Don’t Look Back (2010)/ Memory Preservation Salts (2011) 137
Introduction 139
Section 1: Journey to South Africa (détour) 143
The Journey 157
Starter Culture and Khlebosolny (2009-) 159
Family Photograph (2009) 1638
A Family Recipe (2009) 165
Khlebosolny at the docks 169
South Africa: Don’t Look Back (2010) 171
South Africa: Offere (2010) 177
South Africa: Sal Sapit Omnia (2010) 181
South Africa: Dinner Party (2010)
183
Section 2: Brixton Market (retour) 184
Brixton: Memory Preservation Salts (2011) 186
Brixton: The Darling Salt Pans and Produce Co. Market Stall (2011) 188
Brixton: Aurophone and Confabulation (2011) 196
Project 2: Journey to Eastern Europe (and back): Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt (2012) 205
Introduction 207
Section 1: Journey to Eastern Europe (détour) 215
Hamburg: Finding Anne (2012-17) 215
Vilnius: Starter Culture and Khlebosolny (2012) 239
Rokiskis and Obeliai: Offere II (2012) 243
Section 2: The Arch (retour) 250
Brixton: Dominoes group sessions 256
Brixton: Market conversations 258
Heritage Products stall (2012) 260
Brixton: The Dinner Party (2012) 262
Brixton Exchange 264
Project 3: Journey to Portugal (and back): Salinas/Saltfish (2013) 271
Introduction 273
Section 1: Journey to Portugal (détour) 277
Portugal: Journeying to the salinas: technology, tradition and change 279
Lisbon: Salted Paper Prints (2013) 301
Lisbon: The Mercado de Ribeira 309
Lisbon: Saltworks (2013) 317
Section 2: Heritage conversations (retour) 324
Brixton: Learning from Neighbourhoods 324
London: Salinas maps (2013-14) 330
London: Salt casts (2013-14) 330
Drysalter 332
London: Saltworks (2014) at Cities Methodologies 3349
Project 4: Journey to Haiti (and back): Goute Sel/A Taste of Salt (2013) 337
Introduction 339
Section 1: Journey to Haiti (détour) 343
Haiti and the poetics of salt and slavery 343
The Ghetto Biennale 351
The ethnography and politics of Vodou 361
Vodou space, tourism, and looking 367
Zombis and salt 371
Grande-Saline: Searching for salt in Haiti 377
Learning the veve 379
Port au Prince: Goute Sel (2013) 383
Section 2: The Brixton Museum (Retour) 396
Brixton Conversations (2015) 396
The Brixton Museum (2015–16) 398
Conclusion 405
Bibliography 417
Books, chapters in books, journals, newspapers 418
Interviews 448
Archive Sources 448
Artworks 449
Websites 451
Appendices 461
Appendix A: Invitation and list of ideas for ship voyage 462
Appendix B: The Anchor & Magnet Statement of Intent. 465
Appendix C: Market contract/Consent form 469
Appendix D: Quote cards for Brixton Dinner Party (selection) 470
Appendix E: Transcription of Anchor & Magnet Dinner Party 471
Appendix F: Programme of Brixton Exchange 1 and Walking Tour 475
Appendix G: Brixton exchange 1 plenary (transcription) 483
Appendix H: Anchor & Magnet pull-out in The Brixton Bugle, February 2013 490
Appendix I: Anchor & Magnet, Brixton Exchange 2 outline 496
Appendix I: Brixton Exchange 2 review 498
Appendix J: Anchor & Magnet, Extract from THI Social Heritage report 501
Appendix K: Grants, Exhibitions, Conference Papers and Publications of thesis research and artworks. 503
Appendix L: Summary of all artworks 506
Insert: Revised Methodology Diagram, 2018.
Katy Beinart, ‘Don’t Look Back: The challenges of public art and meanings of authenticity in heritage contexts,’ in Public Art Dialogue, Vol. 10, Issue 2, (2020), pp.161–83
Katy Beinart, ‘Salted Earth: 4 Journeys,’ Feast Journal, Online at http://feastjournal.co.uk/issue/salt/ (2020)
Katy Beinart, ‘Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt: a time-travelling journey to Eastern Europe (and back),’ Mobile Culture Studies 4: Artistic representations of Migration and mobility
Katy Beinart, ‘Salted earth: salt-making as a poetics of mobility and place,’ in Rurality Reimagined (Applied Research + Design, 2018)
Katy Beinart, ‘Origination: Journeying In The Footsteps Of Our Ancestors,’ in Sacred Mobilities: Journeys of Belief and Belonging. ed. Avril Maddrell, Alan Terry & Tim Gale (Ashgate, 2015)
Katy Beinart and Sam Barton, ‘Saltfish: A Conversation,’ Alter Magazine, Issue 1, (2014).
Katy Beinart, ‘Reading between the lines: artistic approaches to the family archive,’ The Archive and Jewish Migration, Special Issue of Jewish Culture and History (May 2014).
Katy Beinart, ‘Becoming and Disappearing: Between Art, Architecture and Research,’ Arts and Humanities in Higher Education (2013).
Katy Beinart is an interdisciplinary artist whose art works include installation, public art, film and performance.
After studying architecture, Katy has practiced as an artist since 2004, combining art and architecture to make artworks in the public realm as well as exhibiting in galleries, festivals and biennales in the UK and internationally.
She uses processes of participatory research and social practice to respond to the context and history of places and people, and her work examines relationships between heritage, history and memory, culture and environment, performance and ritual, migration and home. She draws on past and present material cultures in her projects, often adapting old technologies, found objects and everyday activities and rituals. Her work aims to reveal and question pasts, and ask how these belong in the present circumstances of places, and might shape their futures. In this sense she is interested in memory as a practice that is active and alive.
