Dávid Koronczi - Guardians of the Savory

Guardians of the savory

in cooperation with Erik Pánči
& Celestína Minichová

...

Oerol, Terschelling, NL
13.6.-22.6.2025

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At the center of our work Guardians of the Savory stands a replica of the gate of the former Salt Office (1701–1835) in Halič, a small town in southern central Slovakia. This office was once a branch of the Hungarian (later Austro-Hungarian) salt monopoly. It was part of a broader imperial infrastructure that ensured the distribution of salt—a rare and protected resource at the time—across all counties of the monarchy.

Today, more than 1,500 kilometers to the northwest, on the Dutch island of Terschelling, we perceive salt differently. Here—as in many other places around the planet—it appears as a symptom: an index of climate change, rising sea levels, and increasing salinity in groundwater and farmland. Besides that, what was once a protected treasure now feels like a cheap, nameless commodity—piled on supermarket shelves without story, origin, or opinion.

The philosopher Lukáš Likavčan invites us to “return to a naïve trust in reality’s ability to offer us clues, instructions, and indices.” Through this speculative lens, we can perceive salt not only as a material, but also as a language—a trace, or even a message from the planet. It whispers. It warns. And perhaps it pleads.
This work connects the salt-soaked soil of Terschelling with the artist’s home region of Novohrad. The gate becomes a symbolic threshold—a tear in spacetime. Through it, we explore how agriculture under saline conditions can become a conversation with the Earth’s metabolism—a dialogue about care, adaptation, and imagination.

The gate consists of two visually articulated façade surfaces. The frontal design, created by Dávid Koronczi, is covered with a collection of fictional salty tags, graffiti, and inscriptions. Some are understandable, others remain cryptic. Their salty materiality suggests and reminds us of the thin boundary between life and non-life, between the organic and the inorganic world. The salt crystals on the surface of the reliefs subtly shift each day—absorbing the night’s humidity and hardening again in the daytime. They move, they draw, they sculpt.

The second, seemingly hidden side of the gate was created by guest artist Erik Pánči, whose work stems from the hypothesis that space is not a fundamental given, but a secondary, emergent phenomenon of nonlinearly oscillating time. He does not see time as a simple vector or homogeneous flow, but rather as a complex, multi-dimensional entity made of resonances, tensions, and interferences. What we perceive as reality is, according to this concept, a harmonic concord of multiple speeds of time’s passage. Through this, we emphasize the geographical and temporal connection between two distant parts of Europe.
Within the timeframe of the festival, it is important to note that both sides of the gate function as sculptural reliefs unfolding in time—they are not static outcomes, but open processes in which colours and structures merge into rhythmic perception. Rather than representing, they occur. They are not images of the world—they are the unfolding itself.

An essential part of the work is also its setting at the De Zeekraal farm, run by the Bakker family. This is a space of sounds, scents, labour, fatigue, and hope. A place of understanding, care, but also of domination. A space of mutual dependencies.

Into this environment, we brought—beyond the gate—also a trace of a French formal garden: a labyrinth, maze made of plastic crates instead of boxwood. These crates—perfect pawns of late global capitalism—are designed to fit snugly onto a pallet. Pallets to fit precisely into containers. And containers into massive ships. A matryoshka of trade, extraction, and anthropocentric organisation of the world.

At the centre of the labyrinth stands the aforementioned gate—a portal, a liminal space where proximity, hospitality, or understanding might emerge. But as Jacques Derrida reminds us:
“To exist, hospitality needs doors. But if there are doors, there is no longer hospitality... If there are doors and windows, it means that someone has the keys, and thereby controls the conditions of hospitality. There must be a threshold… (And so) it is necessary to make the impossible. If hospitality is to truly exist, the impossible must happen.”

We need everyday miracles, even small ones. Because—as the philosopher Lukáš Likavčan asks in conversation with artist András Cséfalvay: “How are we to live in a world, on a planet, that does not care about us?”

Accompanying Programme

13th – 18th June 2025, 11am – 5pm
Celestína Minichová, performative care for the work

The artwork will be tended to and explored during the first days of the festival by the artist Celestína Minichová, a.k.a. Dr. Cell:

Our name is Dr. Cell (they/them) - co-researcher of M.O.L.E. Laboratories, temporary guardian of the savory. We are the smallest unit that can live on their own and that makes up all living organisms and the tissues of the body. We are present in the complicated xenorhizomatic web of non-linear time-space constellations. We play with visibility, sensibility, “attentionality”. We navigate ourselves by chance - having the ability to embody different beings - learn with them and after a while leave them be.

Our deep curiosity narrows down and at the same time grows further underground, lays in a question: How can we re-articulate the environment to be able to (under)stand it and (under)stand with it?
Lets explore how can one truly sense with Terschelling?

The sand slips
The sand pours
Held by the warmth of your skin we melt - we flow through the barriers of the horizon
And
Thoughts which we thought that we knew
Their meaning fades away with the grains of sand carried by strong winds above the artificial lands of defence
Dunes lose their stability
And
Muscle mass stimulates the shadows of oblivion
It's so beautiful to cry with you
It's so beautiful to grieve with you
And
Salt soaks through soils of earthly forgiveness - the soils of earthly forgetting
All that is left is scent of shallow emptiness

20th & 21th June 2025, 5:30pm – 6:30pm
Dávid Koronczi and Erik Pánči, a Tasting-Sound Walk

As part of Guardians of the Savory, the artists invite you to join a tasting walk that will take place twice – on Friday, June 20, and Saturday, June 21, 2025, starting at 5:30pm. The event has a limited capacity of 30 participants, and tickets can be reserved at www.oerol.nl.

Dávid Koronczi will offer samples of archival vinegars from his family’s fruit orchard, sea levander kimchi made with Limonium collected during his residency on the island of Terschelling, and will prepare his favourite lángoš. And dessert, of course.

Painter and experimental musician Erik Pánči will enrich the approximately 40-minute guided walk and tasting with a live soundtrack, layering sounds of the koncovka – a traditional shepherd’s wind instrument from the Western Carpathians.

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Dávid Koronczi
Guardians of the Savory
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Guest artists: Erik Pánči, Celestína Minichová

Construction: Dávid Koronczi, Erik Pánči

Acknowledgements:
Oerol (especially Simon Tubb, Marin De Boer, Ilse van Kessel), Activate Dorset (especially Bill Gee and Kate Wood), Rita Hoofwijk, Martina Szabóová, Zoja Koronczi, Jaroslav Baláž, Zuzana Trtolová, the Bakker family (De Zeekraal), European Union

This work was commissioned by the Oerol Festival as part of the international project Transitioning LANDscapes and supported by the Creative Europe programme. The work was also supported by Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and the Faculty of Arts, Technical. University of Brno.

Photo: @kimutiae