Virtually each week, Tel Aviv-based designer Erez Nevi Pana takes a visit to the Lifeless Sea, the bottom place on earth. He wraps wood stools and sculptures in loofahs, carries them in salt water, and leaves them for the solar and sodium chloride to work their magic. After 5 to 9 months, they’re coated in shiny, crystalline salt.

Nevi Pana is certainly one of a bunch of designers and artists exploring the inventive potential of salt, a fabric as soon as as treasured as gold. Salt has performed an essential function within the drama of human historical past, however in the present day, desalination vegetation and the mining of potash, bromine and lithium have turned it right into a waste materials.

Nevi Pana says that salt is extracted sooner than it’s consumed. It isn’t economical for factories to wash all of the salt residue so as to promote it, so it has no actual worth. Sodium heaps are positioned subsequent to mineral extraction websites world wide.

In 2019, a UN-backed paper estimated that desalination vegetation would launch sufficient salt water to cowl an space the dimensions of Florida one foot deep in a single 12 months. Creatives in Israel and past try to lift consciousness of the waste drawback and display the potential of supplies. “I wish to create one thing constructive out of man’s interference with nature,” says Nevi Pana.

The designer makes use of an evaporation pond on the Lifeless Sea Works, one of many world’s largest potash producers. Grown within the hotter months, his crystals of seasonal materials are bigger and the extra sturdy are displayed in galleries comparable to New York’s Friedman Benda.

French designer Roxane Lahidzi, in the meantime, makes use of salt from man-made marshes within the Rhne delta to create tables and seats with a marble sample. She mixes 90 p.c sea salt and pure binders and pigments, which she molds and air dries earlier than coating with eco epoxy resin.

It is very important protect its aesthetic magnificence, to encourage the general public to see its worth, he says. His items, which promote for between 1,000 and 20,000, have been exhibited on the Collectable Design Honest in Brussels in March.

Sodium chloride is a life-sustaining mineral with many virtues: it’s antibacterial, antiviral and extremely fireplace resistant, because of its melting level of round 800C.

Henna Burney, a designer on the Atelier Luma design and analysis laboratory in Arles, France, believes salt is the fabric of the longer term. Its abundance means we are able to assume massive, he says. We could in the future construct homes with it. Bernie spent 5 years researching its makes use of, collaborating with salt farmers and designers, together with Lahidji. The staff compressed it into antiviral door handles and grew 4,000 crystallized inside cladding panels on metallic meshes for the tower at Frank Gehry’s Luma Arles arts complicated.

However the virtues of salts include challenges: it’s liable to moisture absorption and corrosion by air and water, and it corrodes metallic. Crystallization can be difficult to foretell. It is a voluntary course of that may simply go unsuitable, Bernie says. In the event you depart the substrate in water for a day, the crystals could also be too giant or they could dissolve if it rains.

Atelier Lumas inside panels bear rigorous testing to acquire certification for inside use, a course of that Nevi Pana is navigating with its salt crystal cladding for a brand new residential constructing in Tel Aviv. For exterior use in humid climates, salt merchandise require a sealant, decreasing their environmental credentials, however Nevi Pana sees potential for his or her use in structure on the earth’s drier environments.

For his crystalline assortment, he collected 5 tons of Lifeless Sea salt, utilizing compression and warmth to create constructing blocks with a marble-like texture. My imaginative and prescient for the Metropolis of Salt dawned after I noticed a mountain of salt in the course of the desert. , he explains. I started to think about white, glowing salt formations coming to life.

Constructing with salt is nothing new. Bolivia’s Nineties Palacio de Sal Resort is product of salt blocks (visitors are requested to chorus from licking the partitions) and Egypt’s Siwa Oasis has salt-encrusted buildings courting again to the twelfth century.

As Chile is the world’s second-largest lithium producer, waste is piling up by pumping brine from beneath the salt flats into evaporation ponds. Chilean artist and architect Mle Uribes Salt Imaginaries mission addresses this. “I wish to present that any object is efficacious if we put an intention to it,” he says of his set up in February on the Palacio Pereira in Santiago.

At its heart is a 3.5-meter-long mural impressed by a self-supporting salt wall she discovered within the desert. The mural consists of greater than 800 triangular tiles of salt residue from chemical firm Albemarles’ lithium extraction website, solid in molds and hardened by warmth.

Uribe is in talks with Albemarle about creating an out of doors set up in Antofagasta, northern Chile, to see how the fabric weathers in one of many driest locations on the earth, however he admits extra exploration is required. Salt is enticing however materially difficult, he says, making it troublesome to search out funding for analysis and growth.

For some creatives, this unpredictability is a part of its attraction. You by no means know precisely what is going to occur, says Tel Aviv-based artist Sigalit Landau, who works within the Lifeless Sea, submerging objects comparable to toys, clothes and textiles. Her sculptures cling like chandeliers from the ceiling of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in her exhibition. burning sea.

She needs their ghostly presence to be a reminder of the fragility of politics within the area and the Lifeless Sea, which is receding by a meter a 12 months as river water is diverted for ingesting and agriculture.

However the habits of salts must be tamed within the home surroundings. Bernie says Atelier Luma is working with Irregular Design to develop software program to mannequin how the crystals kind. Tsohe Studio will showcase it at Milan Design Week in April. Atelier Lumas’ objective, like different salt pioneers, is to make us conscious of its potential whereas seducing us with its glowing magnificence.

The Landaus exhibition concludes with a conceptualization of the Lifeless Sea Bridge between Israel and Jordan, a metaphor for the necessity to cross political divides so as to forestall environmental disaster. “I see the Lifeless Sea as a gathering place,” he says.

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