It captures this thing that escapes me, yet I live from it, and I’m afloat in brilliant darkness.[1]

It’s not every day that we go to a rock salt mine to see an art exhibition. In itself, the experience of reaching 230 meters deep inland is fascinating. When I received the invitation to the opening of Salaris – Ficções a Partir do Sal, an exhibition by Maura Grimaldi, Natália Loyola and Victor Gonçalves, I immediately imagined an arid landscape, a place in the middle of nowhere. It took me to Minas Gerais, Brazil, the land where I come from, and whose name indicates the fierce presence of mineral extraction. There, huge scars on the mountains along the roads recall the violence of the continuous exploitation that marks the Anthropocene.

The first surprise, upon arrival, was discovering that the mine is located in the center of the city of Loulé, in the Algarve. There are approximately 45 km of galleries underground, an underground city. Above the endless labyrinthine tunnels, there are schools, cafes, churches, and veterinary centers. The three-minute descent felt like twenty in the 1m² elevator, accompanied by five people. I’ve been to similar places in dreams, a mixture of ecstasy and fear, something like Alice’s hole. From the halfway point, we begin to see the signs of salt and the latent feeling that we are approaching another dimension.

Unlike what you might expect from a salt mine, we don’t find a snow-white landscape, but ochre and reddish tones that overlap with the cosmic textures. Stalactites revealed themselves everywhere, while they could also go unnoticed, camouflaged in the damp scenery. The sensory aspect of the experience is present at all times. Faced with the encounter between human action and geology, and the confrontation between natural and artificial, the three artistic interventions address the nuances of this relationship. The gesture is also emphasized in Salaris – Ficções a Partir do Sal, provoking perception by other senses.

Victor Gonçalves presents two installations. The dark environment, except for the lighting of the works, causes a kind of vertigo and magnetism when we come across Evento Sentinela (2025). 1308 paper boats – made from the pages of Braskem’s CPI Final Report on the environmental crime that took place in 2023, at the rock salt mine in Maceió, Brazil – occupy a 128m² rock salt platform². In the background, three points of fire-colored light. Situação Salobra (2025) involves the viewer from the entrance of the gallery, the salt blocks on iron plinths are also sound channels; voices and legal statements mix with the sound of walking in the urban environment of Maceió. Victor transforms official documents and bureaucratic situations into a visual, auditory, and tactile experience, bringing to light the recent devastating tragedy.

Cristal Negro (2025), by Maura Grimaldi, is an audiovisual installation. By capturing images of the mine in the darkness, Maura illustrates walking on a ground that looks like sand but is salt. The documentary film mixes temporalities and points out contradictions based on recordings made in the darkness. The interferences in the images, typical of film filming, associate the analog chemical processes of photography with the extraction of salt and the presence of the element in the intimacy of everyday life. Where do their traces go? Sweat, excitement, tears. Both Maura and Victor reflect on memory, matter, and time, glinting off the raw crystal, different perspectives of its effects on human relationships.

Natalia Loyola presents S/ título (2025), an installation made up of two pieces that connect through sound and action. The work builds up a relationship between two or more bodies and only exists in what is shared. With a metal plate and a directed speaker, the sound is revealed from friction; in the salt sliding and scratching the metal, in the grains scattering, or in the block suddenly thrown onto the platform. The displacement causes a tension between presence and absence, creating a sculptural perception of sound. In addition to the relational aspect, Natalia’s work Awakens attentive listening to what vibrates in the depths of the mineral world.

Excavating the different layers that cross the natural and technological universe, they glimpse coincidences between deep time and current time[2] in this plunge into the earth. Salaris – Ficções a Partir do Sal is part of the Verão Azul Festival and has the support of the Alfaia Association and the Portuguese Republic – Culture / Directorate-General for the Arts, bringing together three Brazilian artists with site-specific works in a wander through the mining space. The exhibition runs until May 16, 2025.

[1] Lispector, Clarice. Living Water. Rio de Janeiro. Rocco, 2019

[2] Marques, Nuno. Text from the exhibition sheet of Salaris – Ficções a Partir do Sal