The lowest point in the world, the Dead Sea is also the unusual studio of this artist who immerses various objects in it -- from a ball gown to a metal structure of a lampshade -- transformed over time into sculptures. salt crystals.
"These waters are like a laboratory," Ms. Landau told AFP, contemplating a coil of wire encrusted with salt giving it a "snowy appearance".
The Dead Sea, a popular tourist site flanked by cliffs and known for its high concentration of salt, constantly offers surprises in the way the Israeli artist transforms submerged objects.
The artist suspends his objects in the super-salty sea in frames touching the seabed near the coast and comes to retrieve them weeks later with the help of assistants.
Having become heavy with the salt clinging to them, some objects require four people to recover them.
"We become very modest. What the sea wants is what I will get" as a work, supports the artist whose fascination with the site began decades ago.
But today, Ms Landau sees "the catastrophe caused by humans" which threatens the spectacular expanse of water wedged between Israel, Jordan and the occupied West Bank and which has lost a third of its surface since 1960.
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Under the effect, among other things, of the diversion of the Jordan River which flows into it and of the evaporation favored by global warming, the blue waters of the Dead Sea retreat by about one meter each year, leaving behind them a landscape lunar.
Sigalit Landau, she fears that the sea will disappear in the long term, unless "governments change their policy".
"It's disappearing and it's not possible, it's too important and wonderful as a place," says the artist, whose dozens of sea-sculpted salt statues will be exhibited in October at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
© 2022 AFP