take it with a grain of salt
Diogo da Cruz's work moves towards the salt flats and coastal landscapes as territories crossed by multiple temporalities. Through walks, recordings and experimentation with salt and ceramics, the artist constructs a speculative fiction accompanied by sculptures in which geological, industrial and affective references coexist. His gaze portrays the salt flats as a sedimented memory of labour, extraction and circulation.
Text and curation by Cristina Anglada
Residency project and exhibition at SES12NAUS alongside fellow resident artists Gala Knörr and Marina Marón, Ibiza, Spain, 2026
“take it with a grain of salt”
departs from a geological catastrophe, when six million years ago, during the Messinian Salinity Crisis, the Mediterranean Sea almost entirely evaporated, leaving a vast desert of salt. Developed across a two-phase residency at SES12NAUS in Ibiza, the project takes the island's ancient salt flats, the Parc Natural de ses Salines, in continuous human use for over two thousand years, as both site and collaborator.
A single-channel video work filmed across the geometric pans and mineral gradients of the ses Salines “would you still love me if I were a rock?” follows a personified grain of salt through the ancient salt flats of the island, a speculative figure that carries within it deep time, human labour, colonial extraction histories and the fragile present of an ecosystem under pressure. Eva Tur, a poet and writer from Ibiza, helped me translate the narration into Eivissenc and gave voice to the words of the salt.
“would you still love me if I were a rock?” video (colour and sound), 15 minutes, voice of Eva Tur
4 min excerpt
2026