Interdisciplinary Symposium HORIZONS OF SALT-WORKING
The research project “Grain of Salt, Crystallising Cohabitation: Salt-making as Experiential Environmental Wisdom” approaches traditional salt-working – the craft of producing sea salt – as embodied practical wisdom. Salt-working in north Istria is characterized primarily by its picturesque landscape and rich heritage and is rarely perceived from the perspective of the intertwining of human and non-human factors. As part of the project research, the project collaborators strive to uncover the understanding of salt-working as a reflection of the cohabitation of the human and the environment. It is the environment that offers and transmits its wisdom to humans, who eventually embody it through experience.
As part of the present symposium, which the organizers have given the broad name of Horizons of Salt-working, the members of the research group wish to present – in the last year of joint research – the project results to an interested professional and scientific audience and especially discuss it among each other. The event served as a step on the path to concluding the project publication and the completion of the project. The event was co-organized by the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Science and Research Centre Koper.
On March 13, 2026, six papers were presented in the Gosposka and Križevniška Halls of the ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana: 1. Shades of Crystallizing: Eco-Ethnographic Approaches to Contemporary Salt-Working (Maja Bjelica; ZRS Koper), 2. Heritagization of the Sečovlje Saltworks (Primož Pipan; ZRC SAZU), 3. Salt-Working as a Nexus of Ethnic Boundaries in Istria (Daša Ličen, ZRC SAZU), 4. Preservation, Destruction, Re-Establishment: Managing the Coexistence between Salt-Working, Nature Protection and Cultural Heritage in the Sečovlje Salina (Jerneja Penca and Matjaž Klun, ZRS Koper), 5. Artisanal Salt Making as a Tool to Connect Nature and Culture Across Generations: The Case of Sečovlje, Slovenia (Katia Hueso-Kortekaas, IPAISAL Network and Comillas Pontifical University) 6. Salt-working as the Love of Wisdom in the Poetic Experience of Elemental Salt: A Philosopher’s Reflections on the Lived Experience of Salt-working (Petri Berndtson, ZRS Koper).
PROGRAMME AND ABSTRACTS
The event is organised within the research project “Grain of Salt, Crystallising Cohabitation:
Salt-Making as Experiential Environmental Wisdom” (ARIS J6-50196), implemented by
ZRS Koper and ZRC SAZU.
