Salt Trace / Jair Tapia

Salt Trace is a site-specific installation that took place in a sand desert. The intention was to make a work that evokes a distant sea at different levels. The visitor reaches the site and finds lines placed on top of dunes that signify sea waves. There is an opening in them that shows a trace in negative space to make it look like a boat just passed through water. At closer exploration, the viewer finds that the lines are composed of different sea related materials and that the elements in the middle of the trace are fishing nets and part of a boat at the middle of the installation to make it seem like  it created the opening in the “water”. Two major components were applied to the creation of this work, the study of personal attachment to natural places and the construction of personal memory. This practice can be aligned with the discipline of site-specific installation combined with phenomenological natural aspects. The media for this kind of work is mostly natural elements. These are arranged in an experimental manner in order to make the visitors experience the installation as an intimate space.
Salt Trace is a piece that signifies a distant sea, but at the same time is designed to integrate sea related elements into a number of sand dunes. The result brings a sense of home in a very personal way as I am also literally constructing events from my autobiographical memory. The context of this work is the place where the installation takes place. But, it starts from the moment when the visitor starts exploring the desert by following a trail until they find the installation.

See Related Images and Descriptions