SALT AND LIGHT
by Ivan Petrović
portfolio winners call 'URBANAUTICA INSTITUTE AWARDS 2020', 2020
Category: People and Communities
The series of photographs Salt and Light is a work in progress starts in 2014 thematizing life in Serbian villages and rural areas. The predominant motifs in this work are landscapes and scenes with people doing work in the field.
Intention of the work Salt and Light is to diagnose the state of affairs related to the fundamental resources in Serbia, in one way, and to another, trying to define the present cultural and living model in the village of our times. Regarding to that, one of the main issues that the work Salt and Light refers to is control of food production as a type of political freedom?
The title, speaking in both real and metaphorical terms, refers to the only two types of goods that peasants in pre-modern Serbia were buying, as opposed to producing themselves – salt and petroleum for lamps. Bearing in mind that such an unchanging situation has conditioned all the circumstances of village life and its development, as well as, the outward appearance of the village, using of this title is pointing the long-term state of affairs in villages and the social atrophy that necessarily resulted from the lack of normal and sustainable development – in fact, to a life process that is dying out, even though the village, land and food constitute the most vital resources in economic, political and social terms.
