“Nobody has any intention of building a wall.” 

 

This line came up while we were discussing the title of the piece. The open lie was spoken in 1961, less than two months before construction of the Berlin Wall began. Yet I insisted that the piece be simply titled “A Wall” as I also had no intention of making a political work. The song “Nobody Home” from Pink Floyd’s album The Wall played in my mind when we baked the salt-dough bricks. 

 

We used salt and flour to make bricks, filling the opening of a fortress window. In the middle of the performance, the wall kept collapsing, and we repeatedly attempted to rebuild it. Salt dough is primitive material familiar from childhood, and we were drawn to its sculptural quality: the salt tightens the gluten in the dough making it tough, and in response to the site Salzburg, literally “salt fortress”, which owes much of its history and wealth to the salt trade, once known as “white gold.”

 

In conversations and collaboration with Sabina Baisarova, an artist from Chechnya who lived in Moscow, our exchanges around autonomy, independence, interdependence, defense, protection, failure, and belonging opened up a parallel universe of thought. Living within our current predicament, we shared what had happened in our respective homelands and discovered that Chechnya and Hong Kong each experienced a critical turning point in their histories around the same time: 1996 and 1997.

 

Rising above the city, the Fortress embodies the prince-archbishops’ desire to assert political and religious power. Yet the fortress was never actually attacked, leaving its defensive function untested. This tension between protection and vulnerability, power and resilience became a starting point for the work.