At Oerol 2025, Guardians of the savory became the first public sharing from the artists selected for Transitioning LANDscapes — a collaborative artwork grown in place at organic sheep farm De Zeekraal working alongside the owners: the Bakker family. The installation centred on a sculptural gateway and a maze assembled from green produce crates, inviting audiences to move slowly, listen and look as salt traced and re-traced the surface each day. The piece presented two faces in dialogue: Dávid Koronczi’s relief, inscribed with fictional “salty tags,” and guest artist Erik Pánči’s counter-relief, informed by his painter’s eye and interest in time’s shifting textures.
Across the festival period, 4,024 people visited the work. Many stayed a while — to watch the salt breathe with the weather, to ask questions, or to talk about farming, flooding and the taste of the island itself. In Dávid’s words: “The piece worked as a platform for conversation — audiences wanted to step in, even when a bit of not-knowing was part of the experience. It feels like the beginning of a bigger research.”
Two intimate public tasting moments added another layer. Twenty-five participants joined each ticketed tasting lecture as Pánči performed live with the traditional koncovka flute while Koronczi served archival fruit-vinegars, sea-lavender kimchi (foraged during his residency) and freshly fried lángoš — turning the installation into a guided, sensory lecture on salt, soil and care.
Collaboration sat at the heart of the process. Working on a working farm shaped everything: the daily rhythms, the conversations with volunteers, and the way the piece sat — visibly — between art and place. As Dávid reflects: “Oerol offered a unique context: a farm, amazing people, and a community that made the merge of location and art possible.”
Guardians of the savory now stands as a first taste of what Transitioning LANDscapes is setting out to do: connect local land-based knowledge with artistic practice and public encounter. After this opening chapter in the Netherlands, audiences can look forward to new public sharings in autumn — with Rita Hoofwijk developing work with Le Citron Jaune in France, and Rara Woulib beginning their conversations in Slovakia.
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Guardians of the savory by Dávid Koronczi, with guest artists Erik Pánči and Celestína Minichová. Created on Terschelling at De Zeekraal within Transitioning LANDscapes, supported by Creative Europe.
