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Pueblo de Sal by Gabriel Pinto
20-02.- 22-02.2026
ICTAF, Investec Cape town Art Fair, South Africa
Curated program: 'TOMORROWS/TODAY'
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Pueblo de Sal is the result of Gabriel Pinto’s documentary register of the salt flats of Pampatar (Nueva Esparta) and Las Cumaraguas (Falcón), Venezuela. The series follows communities for whom salt exceeds its economic role. It is the material through which identity, culture, and generational history take shape. In Pinto’s vision, the flats become a conceptual field where matter carries the imprint of a people.
For the inhabitants of these towns, salt is inheritance. Geography and citizen cannot be cleanly separated. Territory reflects the community, and the community reflects the territory. Harvesting has become an immaterial legacy passed from one generation to the next. Salt is sustenance, root, and shared language. It binds the community and gives belonging a concrete form. Pinto photographs this bond as identity inscribed in the terrain, where culture is lived attachment to place. This attachment is sustained through knowledge that is not written. Transmission is oral and bodily, carried through gestures, routines, and presence. At the edge of the lagoon, instruction moves from grandparents
to grandchildren. Heritage appears here as practice, renewed daily, carrying centuries of empirical understanding without becoming a monument.
Labour is not treated as spectacle, but as language. Under relentless sun and mineral corrosion, artisanal extraction demands bodies that adapt and senses that read. The worker does not dominate nature, but synchronizes with it. Wind, water temperature, and the hardness of the crystal become signals to interpret. The process is dictated by evaporation: seawater held in shallow lagoons, left to wind and heat until it crystallizes. In an accelerated world, this is a frontier of patience, where continuity depends on waiting, repetition, and shared discipline. Visually, the flats transform into a grid of mirrors where reality doubles and the horizon blurs between sky and mineral. Bodies incline over water.
Hands with rakes and shovels break the crust and gather salt into heaps. The mirrored surface becomes a threshold between presence and reflection, and the crystalline accumulation a proof that time can still solidify into form.
A decisive thread is youth as continuity. In a context of crisis and migration, young people who assume this ancestral work enact a political act of staying, affirming local identity and securing a legacy that is at once economic and cultural. They take on the trade as safeguard, protection and permanence. Extracting salt in Venezuela today becomes an insistence that one’s own territory remains fertile and possible, ensuring that what has been inherited does not evaporate, but crystallizes into new forms of future. Continuity here is adaptation, carrying forward without losing the bond between community and
place. Pinto’s visual language extends this attention to matter and transformation. In parts of the series, he works with expired film, allowing chemistry and contingency to shape the image. Photographs that seem black and white reveal themselves as colour, while other scenes are intentionally rendered in monochrome. Soft pinks, pale blues, and violets drift across the flats, set against dark working silhouettes and the bright crystalline surface of salt, echoing a landscape that changes under sun and heat, and a culture that persists by transforming.