‘And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile.’

- Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way

Despite the dedication of several fans littering the space, a thick and unwavering heat hung throughout Fabrica’s gallery. Withstanding the desperate whirring, Katy Beinart, in conversation with Professor Nichola Khan, divulged the intricacies of her new book, Salted Earth. As personal as it is expansive, it traces the authors family histories, interwoven with ‘global entanglements of trade, labour, colonialism and migration’. These aspects, each as daunting, are bound by the narrative poetics of salt. As described by Beinart in the book, ‘Salts poetics offers a different way of giving meaning to a place by acknowledging the relational aspects of a place, its ‘elsewhere’ and its ‘pasts’. Beinart welcomes the challenge of an odyssey like publication by utilising the material biography of salt as a grounding device, a way in which to form a defined path through the opaque theories, methods and realities which occupy the book.

As I skulked around the gallery taking photographs, very aware of my heeled boots and the gallery's acoustic tendencies, I was reminded of Marcel Proust's romantic sentiments to the sensual in Swann’s Way. His writings kept weaving themselves into my considerations of Beinart’s lecture, for he details the transformative capacity materials hold when evoking memory, ‘The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling.’ Proust provides an insight into the grounding and navigational capacity held within objects. Stories withheld to texture within fingers, flavour on a tongue and metaphors of the mouth. Beinart also speaks to the linguistic attributes of the substance, ‘The powerful metaphor of salt suggests emotional memory, as well as containing a trace of resistance.’ It is the combination of its tactility, and the emotional resonance of salt that singles it as a truly considerate and versatile instrument to weave the stories of Beinart’s book together.

The author describes ‘the journeys and returns, salts’ other sensory qualities through touch, taste and smell also offer reflections on the experience of place, and memory through the non-visual.’ This consideration of memory specifically evokes Proust’s sensual assessment; that sensation is the key which unveils masked histories and becomes the vehicles in which to explore, away from intellectual sensibilities.

In Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire, Pierre Nora furthers Proust's assertions by stating, ‘memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative.' Nora’s assertion is even more striking for he insists that memory is total and unquestionable to the one who holds it, it doesn't entertain alternative versions of itself, because it isn't trying to be objective. However, history, which must content with ever explosive cannons and inherently comparative structures is forced to be repeatedly challenged. A historian's account will always be debated or superseded by better evidence; a memory, held by one or a community doesn't argue for itself, it persists. He continues ‘Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.’ Beinart’s marriage of personal, tactile memory within the exploration of histories, both personal and impersonal offers a new way for us to interrogate the past, present and future. As Beinart states in the book ‘...in reading identity as relational rather than rooted, opening up the possibility of seeing identity as a continuously changed by relation, rather than fixed or essentialized’ These alternative means of relating to ones memory, to ones identity, is directly addressed in the book with the help of Nora but also 'thinkers such as Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau as well as Gilroy, whose writings on the knotted intersections of histories connected through colonialism can be seen as directly connected to the idea of noeuds de memoire.' These theorists describe knots of memory (noeuds de memoire), or memory traces (Trace-Memoire). Both phrases make memory rigid whilst also fleeting, they are the substance which whole lives and communities rely on to take shape, but are held at the mercy of a forgetful mind. Utterly intangible yet indispensable. Rooted salt mines and residue on a plate.

After the talk, my boots now lying silent in the corner of my living room, I found my copy of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way, which I am still hesitant to return to the university library, I flip to a marked page which reads:

‘But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest’.

I was sure to have extra salt with dinner that evening.

Bibliography

Beinart, Katy. Salted Earth: Poetics of Place and Migration Through Four Artistic Journeys. Bristol: Intellect, 2026.

Intellect Books. "Salted Earth." Accessed July 15, 2026. intellectbooks.com/salted-earth.

Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire." Translated by Marc Roudebush. Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24.

Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright. PDF. uberty.org. Accessed July 15, 2026. uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Proust-1.pdf.

Words from summer Marketing and Communications intern Esme Boardman Hoare