Couz – SEE DJERBA

Couz. SEE DJERBA Houmt Souk 2024. Photo: Couz.

Couz. SEE DJERBA Houmt Souk 2024. Photo: Couz.

Couz. SEE DJERBA Houmt Souk 2024. Photo: Couz.

Salt
Bringing together salt, light, and digital connectivity

This interactive installation explores the intersection of salt as an artistic material and light as a medium, creating a sensor-based, audiovisual experience that responds dynamically to environmental changes.

The artwork invites viewers to engage with the ever-changing forms, colors, and shapes created by the interaction of salt crystals positioned on light sources, ranging in hue from pristine white to deep rose and red. It generates a play of backlit crystals, transmissive structures, and their reflection in space. The interface is designed to correspond to the surrounding environment, with sensors detecting sound changes and influencing the installation’s behavior. This responsivity allows the artwork to evolve in real time, creating a dialogue between the viewer, the material, and the space.

Salt, a daily use material with profound cultural, natural, and health-related significance, is transformed into a medium of esthetic experimentation. The installation leverages salt’s unique transmissive, reflective, and absorbent qualities, playing with light and shadow to create an esthetic landscape. As light passes through, bounces off, or is absorbed by the salt, the resulting patterns shift, casting intricate shadows and producing a spectrum of colors that is both ephemeral and captivating.

Through this artistic research, the installation highlights the esthetic potential of a ubiquitous material and encourages a deeper understanding of its characteristics and relevance. By engaging with salt in this novel context, viewers are invited to reconsider its role in nature, culture, and health, discovering new meanings in an element often taken for granted.

This multifaceted artwork by Couz unfolds in two interconnected components, each engaging with the historic Dome of Khyal (Ghost) in a unique dialogue of light, space, and materiality.

The first element, an immersive installation within the dome, harnesses interactive light to transform the ancient architecture. Flickering illumination responds to unseen stimuli, merging seamlessly with the space to create a symbiotic, almost sentient environment. This interplay between technology and architecture blurs the boundaries between the physical and the ethereal, evoking the dome’s spectral namesake.

Complementing this, Couz extends his exploration of light and salt through a mapped projection on the dome’s exterior. This second component features macro-photography of salt crystals from the interior installation, magnified and recontextualized. The resulting visual tapestry, with its nuanced gradients and translucent qualities, interacts with the dome’s contours to generate an otherworldly atmosphere. Viewers are transported into a surreal, Martian-like landscape, where the familiar becomes alien through artistic transformation.

Through this duality of interior installation and exterior projection, Couz creates a comprehensive sensory experience. The artwork not only inhabits the historic space but reimagines it, inviting contemplation on the interplay between natural elements, digital technology, and architectural heritage.