Mandala

Instead of being scattered freely, the crystals stand on a sunflower spiral, in rings or in a grid. Over this lies a wave field that forms the arms of the mandala: where the arm lies, the crystals shoot up; between them they stay flat.

The pattern turns slowly, a heartbeat runs from the centre outwards. When someone touches an object, a spiral of its own detaches from the point of contact and runs off through the field.

That crystals arrange themselves is their nature — what the spiral prescribes here is prescribed by the crystal lattice in salt. The museum itself is about exactly that: the permanent exhibition “Das weiße Wunder” at the Westfälische Salzwelten leads into underground vaults full of crystals that formed more than 250 million years ago, shows their lattice structure under salt microscopes and tells how brine becomes salt on the Hellweg — Bad Sassendorf is an old salters' town.

“Mandala” can be experienced at the Ferromone family festival “Farbexplosion” at the Westfälische Salzwelten, Bad Sassendorf – on Saturday, 17 October 2026, 6 to 10 pm.

Placement in the post-digital model of positing

The spiral is the positing: an order that determines where something grows up and where not. The touch posits a second order beside it that runs through the first — two rules in one field, both readable from the form.