Meet the Salt-Loving Community — Chalk Talks

During Oerol festival, the first chapter of the climate fiction film Meet the Salt-Loving Community was presented: Chalk Talks. In this cinematic installation, we follow a route from the sink in the bathroom to the underwater household of coral reefs. We activate the pores of our skin and dive to the bottom of the sea with marine biologist Lisa Becking. Through the eyes of the sea sponge, we see how we are intertwined with this ancient organism through our skin and our households. How do we see the intertidal zone as a place we can call home?


In this installation, you learn to inhabit forgotten memories with your body. We all carry the sea in our bodies through blood as salty as seawater and a skeleton built with calcium. Even our skin with pores is permeable, just like a sea sponge. We only need to remember it.



In the coming time, Meet the Salt-Loving Community will continue to unfold into a growing multiverse of film and embodied exercises. Throughout this process, we will collectively search with our aquatic-loving community for a new kind of ecology where the household you know is infinitely connected to the floodline. Jointly we bring traces of the sea in our bodies and landscapes together in a new household.
Let’s make a collective wave, evolving towards living with the sea.

Chalk Talks — 2024 (11:00 minuten)
The sea provides us oxygen. More than half of Earth’s oxygen is produced by marine organisms. The sea’s underwater habitat and its coral reefs are under pressure. Because we collectively seem to suffer from ecological amnesia in our society, a piece of biodiversity is being lost with every generation.
De Onkruidenier visited marine biologist Lisa Becking in the archives of Naturalis Biodiversity Centre in Leiden. Lisa showed us the vast amount of marine sponges and corals they study and archive there. With this special encounter, we then found the sea sponge in many places: in the city, at the skatepark, in the sink, in the bathroom and in our own bodies.
Credits
Concept en art direction: de Onkruidenier
Filmmakers: Daniel Donato en Anastasija Pirozenko
Voice over: mariene bioloog Lisa Becking
Performer: Zora de Dreu
Audio: Sergio Gonzalez
Special thanks to:
mariene bioloog Lisa Becking en Naturalis Biodiversity Center