FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ At the very genesis of the project, what prompted your interest in salt and the potential for defining a salt economy?

AARON SMOLAR | PHOENIX TIANXU YANG We completed the project Navigating the Salt Economy in Fall 2023, for the studio ‘Legislating Nature’, taught by Elise Hunchuck and Marco Ferrari. For the first assignment, each team had to select a river on a different continent and produce a survey of its watershed. We chose the Nile river as the focus of our investigation. However, rather than consider watersheds as geographically fixed spaces, abstracted away from the environment in its totality — a paradigm that perpetuates a narrative of human control over nature — Elise and Marco encouraged us to read our respective rivers as indices of planetary processes. In other words, in surveying we would consider how these territories have been, and still are, “understood, measured, represented, and lived with.” From this perspective, watersheds are layered, dynamic, continuously reproduced.

We felt strongly that our project, our thesis, needed to emerge directly from the Nile’s material properties rather than phenomena that we would retroactively tie to this river. Early in the survey phase, we were particularly struck by a photograph in The New York Times that captured a thin, shallow portion of the Nile as it flowed through clearly infertile banks with significant salt encrustation. This sickly impression was quite dissonant with the Nile that many people might first imagine — based on historical, cultural, mythological, and other associations. As it turns out, this river’s rapid salinification over the last 50 years presents a major existential threat to Egyptian civilisation moving forward; this photograph made the Nile’s transformation powerfully explicit.

At the same time, salt is, in many ways, essential to human life and the natural world more broadly. This is the case across history, for ancient Egyptians depended on this river’s salt content to facilitate many everyday practices much as we do today. Nevertheless and as evidenced by the Nile, above or below a certain threshold, a given salt content can also have detrimental consequences. We were fascinated by the relation between the Nile’s salinification, its consequences, and the many processes that circulate salt through the environment. We call this network of mutually reinforcing, entangled processes the “salt economy,” and we argue that the Nile is inextricable from — and is thus reconstituted as — this greater constellation of flows. In other words, we reconceptualised the Nile river’s watershed in terms of the salt economy. In a large section perspective drawing, developed over the semester, we portray many processes, operating through distinct spatial and temporal registers, with which the Nile’s salinification is mutually implicated. In its final incarnation, the physical drawing was 25 feet or almost eight metres long.

KOOZ As you mention, the project looks at the increasing salinity of the Nile River andits relation to anthropogenic processes — like climate change, agriculture, and infrastructural intervention — which altogether pose “an existential threat to life”. To what extent is this a geopolitical issue?

AS | PTY Through reframing the Nile River’s watershed as a salt economy, this territory is defined by the entangled processes acting to circulate salt through the environment, as opposed to a geographical boundary. From this perspective, the Nile’s watershed becomes amorphous — at once contained and diffuse across space and time, — more like an atmosphere, with which people are always and already fully permeated. The local and global are inseparable, interdependent. Decisions made in some countries can have localised implications in others, and these consequences can, in turn, drive broader political transformations.

This situation is apparent when considering how interventions upstream on the Nile bear on populations downstream. In 2011, construction began on Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which is located on one of the Nile’s main tributaries. During the studio’s survey phase, we encountered studies that indicated if Ethiopia filled the dam’s reservoir in a projected five-to-seven years, Egypt and Sudan’s freshwater flows downstream would decline by up to 25%. This shift would, in turn, have catastrophic effects on Egypt’s national water and electricity supplies, and thus on many aspects of life in this region (and beyond). Climatic warming has been another major factor in the Nile’s salinification and without addressing these processes at a global level, this trend will continue — compounding these challenges.

KOOZ To date, the opportunity cost of salt production often “outweighs comparatively sustainable practices”. Why is this the case?

AS | PTY The Nile’s rapid salinification is symptomatic of an anthropocentric, instrumental orientation toward the natural world, a view in which the environment is a resource available for human exploitation. Through primarily perceiving the world in terms of ‘means’ and ‘ends’ — especially to optimise profit — proponents of such a worldview abstract away from things as they are for themselves, apart from the uses to which people put them. As suggested above, conventional land surveys perpetuate this logic of abstraction because through such documents, geographers carve landscapes into discrete parts that have no apparent necessary relation to each other. The resulting ecological impact, or ecological debt, is the opportunity cost of proceeding in this way. This tension — which may be more or less explicit — is why we describe a ‘problem of values’, which potentially inhibits people from adopting more sustainable practices.

KOOZ From the territory to the individual, the project brings in bodily ‘measures’, aptly circumscribing “an ecology that is bound by the constant biological negotiation between need and limitation in handling salt”. What is the potential of introducing the human body into the matrix?

AS | PTY This studio’s final phase involved designing an intervention — taken in the term’s broadest sense — to draw out some of the forces that constitute our chosen river or its watershed. We saw the salt economy, in light of how it moves through human bodies, as a way to think about the continuity and reciprocity between the self and the environment. However, anthropocentric economic imperatives typically discourage the adoption or shift towards an appropriately ecocentric orientation toward the planet. As such, the project is envisioned within an alternative economic paradigm where salt is the dominant currency. This idea has extensive historical precedent; for instance, it is widely speculated that soldiers under the Roman Republic and Empire were, at times, compensated in salt (hence the Latin salarium, which became the modern “salary”). Unlike with other currencies today, salt accumulation is limited to certain biologically coded thresholds, and thus relatively fixed across the species. Indeed — as in the environment — both an excess and deficiency of salt have serious consequences for the human body. Salt’s material properties — its taste, its smell, its tactility — resist giving way to complete abstraction as a purely theoretical indicator of value. Insofar as one attunes themselves to these sensations, one might say that salt makes the aforementioned ecological debt phenomenal. We proposed that such phenomenal awareness might act as a catalyst for an ethics of care to emerge among individuals.

KOOZ Your notion of ‘economy’ draws from its etymological root, signifying “a mode of dwelling that is tacitly underwritten by an imperative toward collective stewardship”. How is this stewardship enacted between the corporate parties that deposit salt into the environment, and the farmers who would — in your project — have an opportunity to desalinate their land?

AS | PTY Take the example of a new dam. Through framing salt as a currency, environmental challenges become economic opportunities that simultaneously restore environmental balance. The following are five potential interrelated scenarios that we envision emerging within this system:

- Wealth Redistribution: The dam increases salinity levels downstream. Farmers can extract this salt from their land. In this way, a former disadvantage becomes an economic benefit; unusable land becomes a valuable resource. At the same time, corporations and other parties who deposit salt into the environment are effectively taxed as local communities capitalise on these practices.

- Desalination as a Byproduct of Economic Activity: Because salt is valuable, there is an incentive to extract this resource from the environment. This activity naturally desalinates the environment, restoring the quality of salt-affected soil and water.

- Market Equilibrium and Self-Regulation: As more people engage in salt extraction, the amount of salt circulating as currency increases, naturally causing its value to decline over time. As a result, extractive activity also decreases over that span allowing areas to recover.

- Economic Incentives for Sustainability: Farmers who extract salt from their land invest this currency in more sustainable irrigation practices like cultivating hardier crops, elevating crop beds, and more efficient technologies.

- Redefining Property and Resource Management: This model encourages a shift from viewing land as private property to understanding it as a shared resource requiring collective management, fostering cooperative approaches to land use where all parties invest in maintaining ecosystem health.

KOOZ Ultimately the project questions the relevance of grand global agreements for the deliverance of political mobilisation advocating for a more decentralised approach toward ecological issues in everyday life. What role can architecture play within such approaches?

AS | PTY Rather than “relevance”, we would question their efficacy (at least thus far) in delivering the kinds of sweeping changes that are required to avert, or at least mitigate, future ecological catastrophes. This is not to say that such pacts have not had, or cannot have, successes. However, without fundamentally transforming the largely anthropocentric disposition that belies human values and behaviours, the potential of such agreements is limited. An environmental social movement like deep ecology is instructive in this regard, though we did not come across this concept until more recently. A key idea in deep ecology is that one must expand their sense of self through recognising their interdependence with the greater natural world. By extension, acting in one’s self-interest would mean acting in the planet’s interest. In retrospect, we were definitely proposing a similar vision of individual transformation to bring about a broader shift toward ecocentrism.

Bios

Phoenix Tianxu Yang is a designer at OMA New York, with a current focus on urban design and high-rise projects. He uses drawings and research to interrogate complex urban environments, developing transformative design trajectories that respond to these intricate contexts. Phoenix holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Washington University in St. Louis and completed his Master of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP in 2023.

Aaron Smolar is an aspiring writer, curator, and designer who is currently lamenting the state of the American job market (please get in touch with work or collaborations!) He plans to pursue doctoral studies in media theory and aesthetics. Aaron completed a Master of Architecture and Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices at Columbia GSAPP in 2024. He also holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Washington University in St. Louis.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.