About this Event
June 3: Salt: A Crystal Image of Time — Spectral Attunement in Hypersaline Land‑Time‑Scapes
Speaker: Dr Sam Nightingale
Discussant: Dr James Burton
Moderator: Dr Lee Douglas
Location: Professor Stuart Hall Building |Shireen Abu Akleh Lecture Theatre | Room LG01
5-7pm
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This summer, the Centre for Visual Anthropology (CVA) at Goldsmiths presents Volatile Worlds: Image, Ecology, Extraction a public programme bringing together artists, researchers, and practitioners working across film, photography, and experimental media.
Drawing on anthropology, environmental humanities, and artistic research, Volatile Worlds creates a space for sustained engagement with the colonial genealogies and ongoing effects of extraction, while opening alternative ways of sensing and relating to distrupted ecologies.
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Salt is often treated as residue or resource, but in hypersaline environments it also acts as a medium: it records, transports, and refracts entangled histories across soil, water, air, and infrastructure. This talk draws on my art-based research practice to introduce ‘spectral materialism’—a conceptual and critical-creative approach for attuning to coexisting, non-linear temporalities in environments shaped by settler‑colonial ecological violence and extractivist regimes. Focusing on the semi-arid Mallee in south-eastern Australia, I approach the region as a land–time–scape: a site where deep geological inheritances, settler‑colonial terraforming, and contemporary industrial agriculture converge and persist. This convergence becomes perceptible in the ecological, social, and economic challenges the region faces as salt accumulates in soils and across lake and river systems.
Through art-based fieldworking, I show how salt acts as both an elemental and a technical medium, shaping the image-making practices that emerge in response to hypersalinity. I will present three experimental practices: photographic salt prints made with site salt; soil chromatography that registers metabolic stress in saline soils; and camera-less “para-photo-mancy,” in which halophytes develop silver‑halide film and are stabilised in saline brine. Together, these works shift from representation toward situated encounters and process-oriented modes of working, offering innovative image-making practices as chemical encounters with extractive infrastructures and their afterlives.
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CVA is a research and teaching platform dedicated to advancing innovation in visual and multimodal anthropology, supporting a network of practitioners whose work expands ethnographic theory and form beyond text. The programme is co-sponsored by the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths and KONTEKST Collective, whose 2026 Film Festival Entanglements shares related concerns.
The programme is convened by Dr Alice Cazenave and Dr Lee Douglas.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Goldsmiths, University of London, 8 Lewisham Way, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
