Library of Salt is a multidisciplinary, place-based project that unfolds through site-specific installations and ceremonies and an evolving digital archive. Developed across multiple salt-making regions, the project centers Indigenous salt practices as living knowledge systems, exploring how salt carries ocean memory, cultural continuity, and relationships to land and water. At each site, our collective engages in immersive fieldwork in collaboration with local cultural practitioners and knowledge holders.

We learn from and respond to Indigenous methods of salt harvesting, preparation, and use while approaching these practices with care, consent, and attention to protocol. Site-responsive activations incorporate collected or locally produced salt and include intimate, multidisciplinary workshops that invite participants to build a relationship with various salts through varied writing genres, drawing, photography, close observation, and scientific inquiry. Together, we explore salt as memory, archive, and living relative, weaving creative and scientific ways of knowing in order to learn what salt can teach us about care, reciprocity, and the futures we imagine into being.

Participants contribute observations, visuals, and personal histories to an expanding Library of Salt—a collective archive of relationships, stories, and speculative futures. As an ongoing archival experience, this project builds a shifting, relational framework that invites audiences into contact with material memory and into new ways of imagining cultural and ecological continuity. The Library of Salt’s first activation is a collaboration with poet, performer, and educator, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner.