Event overview
Join us for the CVA Public Programme with artist, researcher, and fieldworker Sam Nightingale who will discuss his critical-creative approach to "spectral materialism."
"Salt: A Crystal Image of Time — Spectral Attunement in Hypersaline Land‑Time‑Scapes "
With Dr. Sam Nightingale
Discussant: Dr. James Burton
Moderator: Dr. Lee Douglas
Salt is often treated as residue or resource, but in hypersaline environments it also acts as a medium: it records, transports, and refracts entangled histories across soil, water, air, and infrastructure. This talk draws on my art-based research practice to introduce ‘spectral materialism’—a conceptual and critical-creative approach for attuning to coexisting, non-linear temporalities in environments shaped by settler‑colonial ecological violence and extractivist regimes. Focusing on the semi-arid Mallee in south-eastern Australia, I approach the region as a land–time–scape: a site where deep geological inheritances, settler‑colonial terraforming, and contemporary industrial agriculture converge and persist. This convergence becomes perceptible in the ecological, social, and economic challenges the region faces as salt accumulates in soils and across lake and river systems.
Through art-based fieldworking, I show how salt acts as both an elemental and a technical medium, shaping the image-making practices that emerge in response to hypersalinity. I will present three experimental practices: photographic salt prints made with site salt; soil chromatography that registers metabolic stress in saline soils; and camera-less “para-photo-mancy,” in which halophytes develop silver‑halide film and are stabilised in saline brine. Together, these works shift from representation toward situated encounters and process-oriented modes of working, offering innovative image-making practices as chemical encounters with extractive infrastructures and their afterlives.
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CVA is a research and teaching platform dedicated to advancing innovation in visual and multimodal anthropology, supporting a network of practitioners whose work expands ethnographic theory and form beyond text. The programme is co-sponsored by the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths and KONTEKST Collective, whose 2026 Film Festival Entanglements shares related concerns.
Convened by Dr Alice Cazenave and Dr Lee Douglas.
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Image credit: Sam Nightingale, Lake Tyrell, 2024
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Jun 2026 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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