Deep inside a salt mine under the Swiss Alps this week, a gathering of Irish people will be able to touch a seam of minerals left by an ancient sea, stretching all the way home to Ireland.
They will be underground to watch a short Irish film shot on location in two Swiss salt facilities. The Sea Inside Us, a film by sculptor Ruth Lyons, was released last year. Lyons spent a decade tracing the geological seam of salt from the Zechstein Sea which runs across Europe, from Ireland to Russia. The sea covered much of northern Europe 250 million years ago.
Among the film locations are the Swiss salt mine and processing site in which the screenings will take place. “We’re bringing the film back to the places where it was originally shot,” says Emer Lynch, the Switzerland-based Irish curator who produced the tour.
The film is a collaboration with director of cinematography Colm Hogan, who followed Lyons from her home on Ireland’s west coast to Northern Ireland and to salt mines across Europe, including Sicily and Switzerland. It explores time, industry and the human relationship with the sea.
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Irish musicians will play the original score live, including the composer of the music, Donegal sean-nós singer Doimnic Mac Giolla Bhríde, along with Frances Morton and Aodhán Gavigan.
Thursday’s sold-out screening will be in the salt mountain at Schweizerhalle, Pratteln’s salt processing site in Basel. The site is almost 200 years old. Brine is extracted from 200m underground and processed into table, agricultural and de-icing salt.
Saturday’s event will take place deep inside the Mines de Sel de Bex, far beneath the Rhône Valley. Here, a 15km labyrinth of tunnels yields 30,000 tonnes of salt a year.
Organising an event in such a unique location is not straightforward, explains Lynch. “My first site visit was last November,” she says. “The devil’s in the detail . . . there’s quite a lot to think about in terms of how the audience would navigate through the space.”
The atmosphere underground is not comparable to a standard air-conditioned theatre. “The mine is a constant temperature of 16 to 18 degrees, because it’s in a humid environment and there is no natural light in the mine,” she says. “We are designing the event so people are moving around rather than sitting in one space.”
On display will be Lyons’s sculptures, hand-carved from salt rock extracted from these European mines. They help show the breadth of colours and density of the ancient seams. Her Salarium works are part of the National Gallery of Ireland and Arts Council collections.
Lynch hopes the effort will have been worth it, saying: “It’s such a raw material to have as a backdrop, it’ll be really beautiful.”
Switzerland has an active Irish community, with an estimated 6,000 citizens in the country of nine million. Events such as traditional music sessions and Irish festivals take place in different locations throughout the year.
Lynch notes a “new wave of interest in the Irish language” there, with Irish language circles starting up this year in Bern and Zurich, as well as Basel Irish Club’s longer-established ciorcal comhrá. ”There’s definitely an interest in the Irish language and keeping it alive here," she says.
Language has been one of the biggest cultural differences for Lynch, who has been in Switzerland for three years and learned German at school in Ireland. “I thought I would come here and just pick it up, but it’s not as easy as that,” she admits, shortly after attending a German language class. “So that’s the biggest hurdle to get over, but I’m getting there.”
She was first based in Zurich, where the German is different to Basel German: “It takes a bit of calibration every time you go somewhere new.”
The event is being organised with the Irish Embassy in Switzerland with funding from Culture Ireland and partnerships with Salines Suisses SA, Salina Helvetica and the Basel Irish Club.
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