Sugar Cane / Salt Flats, 2018

Sugar Cane / Salt Flats, 2018

In 2013, during Tabet’s participation in HIWAR at Darat al Funun and while making The Dead Sea in Three Parts work, he came across the story of an archeological dig South of the Dead Sea that looked into the ruins of a mill which provided sugar to Jerusalem by sending the product across the Dead Sea on rowboats. The image of a boat floating atop the most saline body of water in the world filled with mounds of sugar seemed like a good beginning for a story, a scene or a sculpture. When  the artist was invited to take part in the 30-year anniversary of Darat al Funun he decided to look into the current economy of sugar and salt in Jordan and arrived at a sugarcane plantation in Al-Ramah and carnallite (a salt byproduct) produced by the Arab Potash Company, the exclusive miner of Dead Sea salt until 2058. The installation takes over the Ghorfa by confronting one ton of each of these two elements and proposes an interpretation of a historical event through the contemporary conditions of material production leaving the sugarcane to rot and the carnallite to disintegrate.

Darat al Funun, Amman, 2018