Anna Boghiguian realised ‘The Salt Traders’ for the Istanbul Biennale in 2015. The ancient city of Byzantium, now Istanbul, was at the crossroads of trade between Europe and Asia and, more specifically, a hub in the global trafficking of slaves and salt. The work takes this raw material as a starting point for an indictment of the abuses that now dominate our planet, such as the depletion of natural resources, climate change, the consequences of colonisation and slavery and the migratory movements that accompany them, human rights violations and financial crises.

‘The Salt Traders’ is based on a story, set in 2300, about a Roman salt-trading ship that is suddenly released from the melting polar ice. A future civilisation uses the vessel to study its history.

The installation contains a sail on which a map of the world indicating salt-trading routes is combined with hexagonal patterns, the latter of which symbolise the chemical structure of salt. The shape is also related to the cells of the honeycombs that Boghiguian has placed next to the sail in large frames. Other themes also come to the fore, such as Alexander the Great’s journey to the salt lakes in Egypt; the ‘Salt March’, a 390 km journey that Mahatma Gandhi and his followers made in 1930 in protest against the British salt monopoly in India; and the recent economic crisis in Greece, which Boghiguian describes as ‘a collapse of bread and salt’. Glass windows, on the other hand, show us different kinds of salt, and a drawing of a foetus in the salty amniotic fluid of the uterus indicates that it is also vital for humans.