video 16:40 min and analog photographs
filmed on the location of Solana Ulcinj, Montenegro, between 2020-2021
The Ulcinj Salina, once the largest salt producer in former Yugoslavia, is today a deactivated landscape shaped by both industry and abandonment. What began as a site of salt extraction — pumping seawater from the Adriatic into vast reservoirs, unexpectedly created one of the most important bird habitats on the eastern Adriatic coast.
This film walks the viewer through the traces left by that collapse: from the last salt harvest, to the silence of a deactivated factory, to the echo of a water pump whose sound becomes the only voice of the video.
Shaky, hand-held images bring us close to the landscape — mud, salt, wind, water, and birds, without attempting to explain or exploit it. Instead, the work invites dislocation, fiction, and intimacy, placing us within a fragile present where histories of cultivation, extraction, and beauty converge.
In this landscape, we construct a shifting “we”: unstable, restless, and full of anxiety. Yet it is there that hope remains.
video stills:
the exhibition was accompanied by a publication In Search of Sharawadgi, Landscape Works with Piet Oudolf and LOLA, by nai010 publishers, June 2021.
