Symposium in the Field: Walking and Listening in the Sečovlje Salina Nature Park

Thursday, 25 Sept 2025
Sečovlje Salina Nature Park

The full-day experiential program includes papers, listening walks, guided tours of the park and the Museum of Saltmaking, and a presentations of contemporary saltmaking practices and ornithological guided tour. You can join by:

1) Organized bus transfer from Ljubljana with onboard lecture (departure at 8:15, return at 21:30, boarding point provided after registration).
2) Independent arrival at the location  (program starts at 10:00, meeting point: Fontanigge entrance).

Lunch included in the program. Participation is free of charge. Limited capacity and mandatory registration for both arrival options.

Symposium in the Field: Walking and Listening in the Sečovlje Salina Nature Park

The CENSE symposium Beyond Listening 2025: Walking-with Changes is placed within the broad frequencies of the TO)pot festival and opens space for a day-long experiential event called Symposium in the Field: Walking and Listening in the Sečovlje Salina Nature Park. It is designed to practically address the symposium themes that lie between walking and listening, perceived either as curious research methods or as experiential approaches that allow for a rethinking beyond disciplines towards specific epistemologies and contemporary pressing topics such as inequality, environmental change, and the recognition of more-than-human subjectivities. At the same time, as noted in the symposium’s open call, “by walking-with and listening we engage in embodied practices that stimulate awareness of limited planetary resources and humanity’s destructive impact, from climate change to biodiversity loss. Such practices urge us to rethink the relationships with non-human life, technology, and ecosystems, advocating for an ethical shift and interdependent approach, to inspire coexistence for more sustainable futures.”

Walking and listening in the Sečovlje Salina Nature Park (SSNP) allows walkers and listeners to directly become acquainted with the park, which is home to diverse flora and fauna, and at the same time home to the centuries-old tradition that makes this biodiversity possible – saltworking.

Despite facing numerous challenges, contemporary saltworking persists in preserving the natural–cultural heritage and the specifics of this precious space. The Sečovlje Salina and the Salina of Strunjan are the only ones to have survived the abandonment, coverings, and erasure that other saltworks on the Istrian peninsula have undergone. The experience of walking and listening in the SSNP thus enables us to confront changes, solastalgia, (in)hospitable sound ecosystems and, finally, to recognise the absurdity of the divide between nature and culture that persistently cuts into the flesh of the saltworks’ landscape.

On the way to the Sečovlje Salina Nature Park, the presentation Walking-with the Saltworks: An Essay in Listening-with the Elements introduces the activity of saltworking as one that is fundamentally intertwined with the elements (water, air, fire, earth), which ultimately enable the formation of salt crystals. In the field itself, two listening walks, held by Sara Anjo and Karmen Ponikvar, remind us of conscious walking and present listening. Finally, a paper on sonic solastalgia and the case of the Greek island of Samothraki offers a reflection on some parallels with the experience of changes in the Sečovlje saltworks.

Other activities and experiential happenings at the Symposium in the Field are provided and facilitated by local institutions: a guided tour is provided by the company SOLINE, d.o.o. / SSNP, a guided visit to the Museum of Salt-Making and an introduction to the heritage of saltworking is offered by the Maritime Museum “Sergej Mašera” Piran, and a presentation of contemporary saltworking is facilitated by Muzofil Association.

The Symposium in the Field is also prepared within the framework of the basic research project “Grain of Salt, Crystallising Cohabitation: Salt-Making as Experiential Environmental Wisdom,” which is being implemented at the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies at the Science and Research Center Koper (ZRS Koper), and is financed by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS J6-50196). We would like to thank Cona Institute and the CENSE organisation for their hospitality in implementing the parts of the project and enabling transdisciplinary cooperation at the 2025 CENSE Symposium and the TO)pot festival.

Maja Bjelica,
Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies, ZRS Koper