The Burning Sea [Bridge II], 2022
Video installation, 7:11 min
The work was filmed over the course of nine months, using a drone that revolved hovering above a colorful pile of shoes I had placed on an existing salt island. In the burning sea, water evaporates and salt accumulates. The transformation of the island of shoes means that ultimately they will vanish. An island is the opposite of a bridge, and here I present isolation, not only as a political sentence, but also as a cultural and spiritual point of view. In the video at the right, a man walks over the sea on a tightrope that outlines the mountains of Moab on the other side of the Rift Valley in Jordan. This is indeed a very narrow bridge. The act is fraught with danger – the danger of forgetting the true direction of peace, the danger of dreaming of peace.
In addition to the pile of shoes on the salt island, there are other shoes in the exhibition: the massive shoes that fall through the ice in Gdánsk and the tied-up shoes left behind under the Salt Bridge summit table. Shoes are supposed to connect you to the earth, to ground you and to enable movement. But when the connection and movement don’t work – when nobody wears the shoes – what we are left with is the danger of stagnation.
There is some sort of closure and reciprocity between the salt island here and the spiraling watermelons, between the bridge and the floating line of watermelons. We might remain on the circling island, with the concealed and covered wound which still exists and is impossible to uproot.