Page - 35 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt 35 we made at the salt pans in South Africa (figure 16).68 We did not know for certain if this was where Woolf Beinart was born, but he had lived there at one time and we had brought an of- fering of salt from the place to which he had emigrated. After we shared the bread and salt, we sprinkled the rest of the salt from South Africa onto the ground by the gravestones (figure 17). “The traditional bread and salt ceremony marks the crossing of a threshold, often to a new home. But perhaps we are re-enacting this tradition in reverse: bringing with us the histo- ries of lives that stemmed from this place but were lived out in an unimaginable future. A threshold between different time zones, different possible fates, diverging paths.”69 Through the Khlebosolny ritual, we experienced space and time through touch and taste, an expe- rience of praesentia that, as Hetherington says, mingles distance and proximity; presence and absence; secular and divine; human and nonhuman; subject and object; time and space; vision and touch.70 In the mingling of past and present, and of our own identities with others (our ancestors, and others’ ancestors), an understanding of how connected we are to one another develops. In this encounter, the salt (and bread) are indexical to a knowledge or experience of mingling, and of crossing a threshold of some kind. The taste of salt and bread in the ritual, in this site, provides a direct way (through the material) of encountering our ancestors. Tasting this bread and salt in the cemetery site was also a bringing back of a lost culture, which might be seen as a rebalancing act. Through this act, we then hold in our memories the connection to this specific site whenever we repeat the ritual in the future. This is a praesentia of memory: an encounter with touch (and taste) that is then sealed as a memory. 68 Katy and Rebecca Beinart, Offere I, 2010. 69 Katy and Rebecca Beinart, ‘Offere II’, Origination (blog), 6 August 2012. 70 Hetherington, ‘Spatial textures’, p. 1940. Figure 16: Katy and Rebecca Beinart, Offere II, 2012. Photograph: William Beinart. Source: author. Figure 17: Katy and Rebecca Beinart, Sprinkling salt on graves. Photograph: William Beinart. Source: author.