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Anyone who visits the Salzkammergut gets an idea of the importance of salt in the history of the Salzkammergut. Both the people and the landscape were shaped by salt and water. The main room was divided into two parts by curator Gottfried Hattinger: contemporary art with salt and water.

In addition, the topic of water as the most important resource on our planet was highlighted in an international water conference. Global warming was also addressed by the artists and showed the visitors interesting artistic approaches to climate change and the importance of the access to clean water. The found youtube videos with the falling of entire mountains of snow and ice by Anouk Kruithof showed impressively how quickly our planet is heating up and that it will have dramatic consequences for our planet if global warming cannot be stopped. The artist Caterina Gobbi hiked up the Hallstatt glacier and – while holding a hydrophone in a crevasse and recording the glacier’s sounds – made the melting of the glacier tangible. In their video, Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch showed us a man on a frozen sea chopping a hole in the ice with an axe. He stands in the middle. This is the simplest and most direct way of telling us that we are destroying ourselves: we are sawing off the branch we are sitting on.

Renowned international artists have dedicated themselves to salt as a material in highly diverse art installations. First and foremost the Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto, who has used 6 tons of salt for his installation which was sponsored by the local brewhouse in Ebensee. Yamamoto was fascinated by the Alps which he saw from above when he came by airplane from Japan to Austria. So he built mountains of salt like he remembered the Alps and a labyrinth in a large, expansive installation. Salt is not only considered valuable and pure in Austria, but also in Japan. Working with salt allows the artist to keep the memory of his deceased sister and wife alive. Other artists were also using salt as their main material such as Anna Run Tryggvadottir who created a “garden” with a crust of salt onto big stones, Christine Biehler built a battery with brine as electrolyte and Sigalit Landau or Simon Starling were working with the salt of the Dead Sea. The salt teeth of Michael Sailstorfer showed transcience, the “Heavy Sea” from Norbert Hinterberger connected the Aurora – a ship made out of bread – in a sea of salt stones with the conflict of Russia with Ukraine.

In the historic part of the exhibition, the history about production of salt in the Salzkammergut was told from the view of the working people. Salt was already being mined in Hallstatt 7000 years ago. Until the 15th century the excessive salt production led to immense deforestation in Hallstatt. For this reason, a 40-kilometer-long pipeline was built from Hallstatt via Bad Ischl to Ebensee. It is the oldest pipeline in the world. More than 13,000 tree trunks had to be hollowed out by hand to transport the brine to the brewhouse without pumps – and this is how it still works today.

The brewhouse, which has been empty since its closing in 1965, is now undergoing a transformation – from an industrial use to a place of artistic positions, a place of culture and reflection between contemporaneity and history.
As the building is substandard, it took us quite some effort to turn the Sudhaus into a good exhibition space. Ultimately, we can look back on an exciting exhibition in an interesting industrial setting. Nevertheless, there were some challenges that we had to overcome. This particularly concerned the work of Motoi Yamamoto. In order to be able to apply the salt to a homogeneous, smooth and matt surface, we first had to find a substrate that would ensure that there was no shrinkage of the floor due to temperature differences. When the compound was applied, we absolutely had to have a minimum temperature of 12° C so that the liquid could dry without causing cracks. This was finally achieved. Motoi Yamamoto used 6 tons of salt on the first day. That was one ton too much, because this salt was intended for the artist Anna Run Tryggvadottir. So we had to have an extra ton delivered quickly to make sure we had enough salt for the other artists. His meditative work and precision were palpable when looking at the labyrinth.

We always were a bit afraid that some visitors might destroy the fragile salt labyrinth as the salt wasn’t fixed but lay loose on the ground. One morning, we suddenly noticed tracks in the salt. At first we thought it was traces of a dog. When we analyzed the paws, it turned out that a marten must have entered the exhibition via the roof. The animal had walked through the entire labyrinth and had a very close look at the salt mountains. Motoi took it in his stride. Because nature found itself a path into the old brewhouse and it was a good story to tell visitors in our guiding tours! And when the exhibition was over, many people took a sack from Motoi’s salt labyrinth home with them. And the rest will go to a museum in Salzburg. The memory lives on!