Anouk Sugar
material culture | resources by enrique enriquez
IMPERFECT
fashion impurities perfection
nature change
You are the salt of the earth.
—Jesus to his disciples (Matthew 5:13)
reads ‘ and Morton’s Salt pours for the same reason, it’s all salt, perfect cube crystals ’. This sentence cannot better express the (already in agony) modernist ideology. The achievement of a supposed ‘perfection’ by standardisation, reaching for universal properties was Le Corbusier’s mantra:‘all men have the same functions and the same needs’. It is not by chance that Corbu chose the colour white as his signature. After thousands of years of struggle to make salt white and even grain, affluent people will now pay more for salts that are odd shapes and colors. Gray salts, black salts, salts with any visible impurities are sought out and marked for their colors, even though the tint usually means the presence of dirt. Many consumers distrust modern factory salt.They would rather have a little mud that iodine, magnesium carbonate, calcium silicate, or other additives, some of which are merely imagined. But modern people have seen too many chemicals and are ready to go back to eating dirt.Then, too, many people do not like Morton’s idea of making all salt the same. Uniformity was a remarkable innovation in its day, but it was so successful that today consumers seem to be excited by any salt that is different.. 2 We are seeking more and more the organic characteristics of irregularity, unpredictability, messiness, variation, or what I like to call imperfections . I love imperfections; they have distinctive, beautiful qualities that help us to better notice the real . I am not an optimist about trends, but I truly desire this time that the new perfection is the imperfect. The problem with Fordism is that we erased those characteristics that distinguished us as being human. The acceptance of an imperfect world would perhaps lead to a better one, or at least a different approach; and dear God we are desperate for such a change. Salt, a material that has shaped the world; a small reflection of our present times; and maybe, if we look closely, a diminutive crystal ball that will predict our future: dirtier? messier? Perhaps; but for sure, less white. n
With materials we create products and they, in turn, are producers of things. Some materials better represent human history than others, or at least have a better spotlight: coal, wood, water and – of course – the U2 of all materials, oil. What about the small rock that is salt ? My interest in this tiny material dates from living in Canada. Years ago, I was visiting the Musée des Civilizations in Quebec City when I was surprised to learn that Canadians are one of the highest salt consumers, however a large percentage of that salt is only used on roads to melt the snow.Anyone who lives in a winter urbanscape knows the David versus Goliath cleaning battle against salt brought into the house on your boots. Since then, every time I put salt in my salsas I see it differently. Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history. 1 Last year, designing a garden proposal with my colleagues, Urban B’s, for the International Festival Jardins de Métis/Redford Gardens and wanting to emulate the image of the winter garden during summer with a white natural material, salt came to mind. I started to investigate and discovered a whole not-so-small world. Towns, cities, empires, wars and even countries have been built around salt, a cultural engine of great power.. In my mother’s kitchen we had uniform odourless all-white salt. Today in my own kitchen I have six different kinds of salt with distinctive shapes, sizes, colours, scents and flavours: table or common salt, rosemary Canadian rock salt, aromatic sea salt with fresh organic herbs, black salt from Hawaii, salt for grilling meat bought in Portugal and Williams-Sonoma chilli-lime rub with sea salt. Definitely my world of salt has changed. The value of salt is a question of supply, demand and labour, but also of culture, history and fashion. A 1919 advertisement
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