Posolontsy – Salt walkers in Thailand

2024, Micro Monuments, Minik, R²

Monument to Travelers

Installed on 16.12.2024

Ao Leuk, Koh Tao, Thailand

Bioceramics — salt, flour, water, acrylic pigment
7 × 5 × 9 cm

How does a monument travel?

From 26 November to 16 December 2024, two small figures travelled with us from Hungary to Thailand. Along the way, they were brought into contact with places, monuments, landscapes, and sites of cultural significance.

They travelled from Budapest Airport to Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, and finally Koh Tao. At each stage, we looked for a place where they might belong.

The figures were made from salt, flour, and water — a material that could travel easily but could not remain unchanged.

On Koh Tao, heavy rain began to soften them. Their bodies started to swell and change.

Instead of protecting them from the weather, we brought them to a spirit house near Ao Leuk beach.

There, the little travelers were left to negotiate with the place.

The next day, the weather cleared.

Whether this was coincidence, ritual, or simply the logic of the landscape remains open.

The monument was never intended to be permanent. Its journey, its encounters, and its eventual transformation are part of the work.

A Minik is not designed to occupy a place indefinitely. It enters a place, stays for a while, and becomes subject to the conditions it encounters.

Here, the monument itself became a traveler.

And perhaps the final destination was not a location at all, but a temporary agreement with the place.

R², 2024

Posolontsy – Salt walkers

Micro Monuments, Minik, R²

Monument to Travelers

Installed on 22.06.2023

Dock, Zadar, Croatia

Bioceramics — salt, flour, water, acrylic pigment
10 × 10 × 5 cm

How long does a monument need to remain in one place to become a monument?

In June 2023, two small figures travelled with us from Keszthely through Dalmatia to Zadar. Along the way, they were repeatedly placed into different environments — forests, towns, coastlines, mountains — to see where they might fit.

The figures themselves were made from salt, flour, and water.

They were small, slightly amorphous travellers: one wearing a panama hat and moustache, the other glasses. They travelled hand in hand, carrying their tiny backpacks.

In Zadar, they finally found their place on a mooring bollard near the Sea Organ and the Greeting to the Sun.

The rough surface of the bollard became their pedestal. The sea, salt, sun, wind, and constant movement of the waterfront became part of the work.

We did not attach or fix the figures to the site.

They were simply left there.

This is how Posolontsy came into being — a playful word combining the ideas of walkers, travellers, and salt. They had travelled through the salt of the road and arrived at the salt of the sea.

MONUMENT INSTALLATION:

We do not know how long they remained in Zadar.

And this uncertainty is part of the work.

A traveller is not expected to stay.

JOURNEY AND SITE TESTING:

Keszthely → Split → Žuljana → Ston → Mali Ston → Sveti Ivan → Orebić → Zadar

The journey was part of the work. Each location became a temporary testing ground: would the figures belong here? What would happen if they were placed within this particular landscape?

The final installation emerged not from a predetermined site, but from the accumulated experience of the journey.

PROTOTYPES AND IMAGES:

From the authors

“Let them walk with us for a while. Maybe the right name will come later.”

The name came in Zadar.

Posolontsy — Salt Walkers.

Digital trace

Instagram · Posolontsy — Salt Walkers

Instagram · Posolontsy — Minik

Miniks

Micro Monuments, Minik, R²

Miniks are small-scale interventions placed in real environments and left to encounter the conditions of the place.

They may be made from simple, biodegradable, or found materials. Some resemble figurines; others take the form of ordinary objects. Their scale is deliberately small, allowing them to enter a landscape or everyday environment without dominating it.

A Minik is not intended to become a permanent monument.

It may remain for days, months, or only a short time. It may be noticed, photographed, moved, damaged, absorbed by the environment, or disappear altogether.

The work therefore exists between object and event, presence and disappearance, monument and trace.

The site is not simply where the work is placed. It becomes part of the work’s duration and meaning.

Works

Posolontsy — Salt Travelers
2023 · Zadar, Croatia

Salt Walkers in Thailand
2024 · Koh Tao, Thailand

The Red Stag from the Red Earth
2022 · Bauxite Lens of Lake Darvash, Hungary

The Red Stag from the Red Earth

Minik, Quarry, R², Revealed Realism

Series: The Quarry as Witness

Bauxite lens of Lake Darvash, Hungary

2022

The place

The Bauxite Lens of Lake Darvash is a former bauxite quarry near Nyirád, Hungary. Its deep red earth is the visible trace of a landscape shaped by geological processes and decades of extraction.

Bauxite mining in the Nyirád area began in the 1940s. The ore was extracted through underground mining and the pumping of karst water. The quarry was closed in 1977.

Today, the site is inactive. Its red slopes and exposed geological layers remain as traces of both deep geological time and industrial intervention.

The intervention

In 2022, R² made a small stag from cotton wool and coloured it with earth pigments collected directly from the quarry.

The figure was photographed within the red landscape and then left there.

There was no label, explanation, or protective enclosure. The small object simply remained in the quarry, exposed to weather and time.

The scale of the intervention was deliberately disproportionate to the scale of the site: a fragile handmade figure placed within a landscape shaped by large-scale extraction.

The stag was not intended as a monument to a particular event. It was a temporary presence — made from the colour of the place and returned to it.

The Red Stag from the Red Earth
Cotton wool, earth pigments from Darvash, thread, time. 2022

The work belongs to R²’s practice of Revealed Realism (RR): working with what a place already contains rather than imposing an autonomous form upon it.

Here, the quarry provides both the setting and the material. The pigment carries the colour of the earth into the figure, while the figure carries a trace of the landscape back into the landscape.

The work was left without protection.