A tribute to heroines and their hard work is inscribed in concrete and salt
Europe is dotted with monuments to male heroes – warriors, politicians, entrepreneurs, artists… Men as soldiers fought and died on the fronts, men as politicians sat in boardrooms and moved great history, were captains of industry or wrote novels, poems, composed operas… Where have the women gone? Their work, the toil often associated with the survival of their families, seems to have been forgotten or taken for granted and unworthy of remembrance by mainstream society. Slovak artists Ilona Németh and Marián Ravacz draw attention to this injustice with their Memorial to the Women Who Cooked Salt.
Crikvenica is a Croatian town on the Adriatic coast. During World War II, the men left to fight, leaving women, children and old people in the towns and villages. And they had to survive somehow in a situation of a general critical shortage of anything. There was also a shortage of salt, which the women in Crikvenica caught. They scooped up clean sea water and boiled it until only salt remained. They then traded it for food – potatoes, grain, corn.
The women carried water in 30-litre barrels, while the children lugged around bags of up to eight litres. Water was boiled secretly at night in large pots or half-finished iron barrels of about 50 litres. The amount of salt obtained varied between 3 and 8 kilograms per 100 litres of sea water. One kilogram of salt was then exchanged for, for example, five kilograms of potatoes.
An unrealised tribute
Ilona Németh was intrigued by this story, which was unknown to the general public, so she prepared a memorial to the women who cooked salt in Crikvenica. It was to take the form of concrete objects with pieces of rock salt embedded in them. This would be slowly dissolved by the rain and the salt water would evoke the tears of the women who saved Yugoslav families through their heroism. But the city’s political representation changed and the project was abandoned. However, the meaning of the memorial is so universal that it has become mobile and has found its place in various places in Europe.
One concrete casting is now placed in the SEFO 2024 Triennial on Olomouc’s National Heroes Square (temporarily renamed National Heroes and Heroines Square as part of the happening during the installation). People can thus get to know the vision of the Slovak artist in a public space. A detailed documentation and visualisation of the monument is then exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art building. The exhibition is complemented by videos with testimonies of eight women who remembered the wartime salt cooking.
Translated by DeepL.com