Salicornication

Atelier Luma - Arles 2025

Video, Installation, Dinner 

Is this Mars? The landscape looks dystopic, made of mud and shallow red waters that are saturated with salt, cristallizing everywhere. Nothings seems to be able to survive in these hostile conditions, except for a inconspicious plant called "Salicornia".

It was used for centuries for the production of glass and soap, is edible, very healthy and super tasty. Among the only plants able to survive in highly saline conditions of three times seawater, Salicornias real superpower lays in its ability to create cooperation rather than concurrence, whereever it grows. The trick: It encapsulates the deadly salt concentration and thus creates an environment other plants, animals and mushrooms can grow on. Last but not least: The more salt the plant aggregates, the more its colour changes from green to red. It is in the salty marshes of Mars, grown over by red plants, where the revolution starts in Bogdanov's novel.

Our journey takes us back to 1907, to the doctor and socialist revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov, leading the bolshevik party together with Lenin. Asked for the possible outlook of a socialist society at the turn of the century, he simply writes the first soviet science fiction novel. In "the Red Star", a protagonist from Earth is brought to Mars by a marsian spaceship. About 250 years ahead of Planet Earth, the marsians introduce him to their fair and just society, that has long managed to overcome class and gender differences. Marsians explain the visitor how they are trying to climate change and ressource scarcity they are just struggling with and finally bring him back to planet Earth, years before the october revolution and decades before human cause the same environmental desasters, the marsians are warning of.

A little later, bogdanov establishes Tektology, a general organisational science searching for organisational patterns in literally everything - may it be  (biology, geology, sociology, crystals, microorganisms, outer space...) to be used as blueprints for future societies.

As Bogdanov suggested, once upon a time, planet Mars was covered by oceans, but for unclear reasons they evaporated and were absorbed by rocks, leaving the salty, dusty and cold planet we see today. So we travel to the south of france, where the same processes are happening and are about to spread to many other parts of the planet as climate change is increasingly heating it up.