This book combines art, history and cultural studies, by way of a series of journeys on which the author and others make artworks. Each of these journeys resulted from an investigation into the meaning of an everyday substance, salt, in very different places – South Africa, Lithuania and Russia, Portugal and Haiti. Katy Beinart explores cultural meanings and everyday rituals of salt in these four journeys that link migration, trade, empire, slavery and colonialism.

Histories of salt have showed how it has been central to trade, power and capitalism, but these histories don’t offer a way of understanding salt’s poetics. Drawing on fiction, poetry and art Beinart weaves together an argument that develops a material poetics of salt, understanding how salt artworks can symbolise relationships, mobilities, migrations, memory, and intercultural connections from the past and present.

The book begins with a search for family history, and combines family memoir, travel stories, trade histories, auto-ethnographic reflection and artistic process. The journeys, artistic practices and embodied engagements with place and people this book narrates are a way into a different understanding of material entanglements and relations through sensory experience which opens up other ways of knowing.

Supported by funding from the Centre for Spatial and Social Justice at the University of Brighton