LAMENT

A response to Common Salt by Carl Lavery

Common Salt (on-going) is a table-top performance, a ‘show and tell’ made  by Sheila Ghelani and Sue Palmer. The work acts as a ‘map of sorts’, tracing all sorts of rhizomatic connections between colonial salt taxes in India, the predations of the East India company, hedge funds in Canary Wharf, London (the heart of darkness), the roots of Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Stanmore, Middlesex, and the birth of monopoly capitalism in the mazes of Hampton Court. The avatars and effects of climate change, like slavery, like pesticides and toxins, like oil, are everywhere. You can’t avoid them. 

Common Salt defines itself as a LAMENT, and the performers never stop telling us that, as they stand feet away from us, in the halls of The Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, their hands trembling as they move the miniature objects – trees, birds, eggs, salt scales, toy soldiers, flowers – around the table for the ‘show and tell’. Short films are projected, songs are sung, a Shruti Box is played. We are also told, again and again, that people never learn.

This LAMENT is a curious thing, a song that contradicts itself. Like listening to a blues track, Common Salt provokes a momentary sense of pleasure, a release almost, through its very utterance, from the terrible reality that the work tracks, its long litany of devastation and extraction. In that regard the performance taps into a negative dialectic. As we undergo the LAMENT, a kind of happiness fills the room. It is as if the performance, by the simple fact of being performed, enacts its own resistance, a LAMENT that while it speaks of the past and appears to have little hope for the climactic injustices to come, somehow refuses to give into despair. Not only that: it starts to produce affirmative feelings, a hope that maybe things could be better, in spite of it all. The happiness created is, of course, fragile, small-scale, but it is nevertheless there, a flickering flame. The performance is able to maintain that flame because of its aesthetic dimension, the fact that it taps a surplus of something, a warmth, a care, an excess that emerges from bodies being together as the performance meanders through time and space.

Performances that talk or represent climate change without this surplus, this LAMENT, fail to move us. They leave us cold, in despair, simple exercises in transparent communication. The secret of Common Salt was found in its opacity, its fugitive nature, the sense in which it acted as a spell, the very thing that as Michael Taussig proposes in his great text Mimesis and Alterity is what allows us to effect a shift from critique to habitus, to living the knowledge, not just computing it – and then turning away.

Carl Lavery, November 2023