There are five finalists in the Sadakichi Award for Experimental Work with Scent.
Cerca (Closer)
by Alejandro Ros and Pablo Eduardo Schanton
Perfumer: Various (IFF)
Argentina
CERCA (Closer) is a audio-olfactive performance. The public enters a dark room where four naked human bodies (two men and two women, one is a transgender woman) are sleeping. The impression is that they are floating quietly in the blackness at a height of 1.40 metres, so your nose approaches to smell the scented bodies. Instead of “body painting”, Closer is based on “body scenting”: each skin has four different scents in four different parts. Under each body, we can hear interior human sounds (a heart beating) or exterior inhuman ones (a mosquito flying). Finally, the experience of the piece depends on an ethic of touch and proxemics: how far should I approach to smell a stranger’s body without interfering with her/his sleep?
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Jónsi (Hvítblinda / Í blóma / Svartalda)
by Jónsi Birgisson
Perfumer: Jónsi Birgisson
Iceland / USA
What is the shape of sound? What does it feel like? Can we smell it? How does it move through your body and what kind of sensations does it trigger? These are the questions that are posed by Jónsi in this exhibition. Best known for producing distinctive musical sounds ranging from hypnotic ambient incantations to driving sonic waves as a member of the band Sigur Rós, Jónsi has expanded his artistic practice over the past few years in a series of collaborations with visual artists such as Doug Aitken, Olafur Eliasson, Merce Cunningham and most recently the artist and composer Carl Michael von Hausswolf with whom he formed the musical duo Dark Morph. In the wake of these collaborations, Jónsi’s most recent solo aesthetic explorations have resulted in a series of immersive installations that sculpt with sound as they ask us to meditate on the liminal threshold between our bodies and the world around us. In this series of three new gallery-based works, Jónsi riffs on the invocation of sensory inversion in Goethe’s fifth Roman Elegy in which the Romantic poet makes a connection between the experience of a lover’s body and a classical marble sculpture with the phrase, “see with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand.”
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Notes
by Lauren Jetty
Perfumer: Lauren Jetty with Renske van Vroonhoven (Attic Lab)
The Netherlands / UK
Notes (3-part storm accord and 3-part vocal accord cast into 3 ice records) is an exploration into the potential cross-modalities of scent and sound. Combining these two physical and yet ephemeral sensory experiences into a physical and yet ephemeral object: a scented ice record. The sound starts as a haunting vocal laced with a crackle of ice, the crackle slowly builds until the vocal has faded and we are left with a rhythm of the ice, akin to a heartbeat. This piece is also an exploration into hyperobjects, specifically climate change; connecting to this huge, ungraspable and yet inescapable notion through the intimacy of a disappearing, transient action. We are captured physically in a moment by the penetrating qualities of scent and sound: we feel time.
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Olfactory Labyrinth V. 5: Invisible Footprints
by Maki Ueda
Perfumer: Maki Ueda
Japan
Imagine you are a dog. You can experience this work in two ways:
A: You can leave fragrant footprints yourself – choose your fragrant slippers, step on the stamp pad to absorb the transparent fragrance, and then walk on the floor.
B: You can trace the footprints of others – sniff like a dog and (try to) trace the fragrance you like. This fifth imagination of Maki Ueda’s Olfactory Labyrinth series culminates in an installation that questions our abilities in relation to the abilities of other creatures. Can we successfully navigate a scent-driven and spatial form of communication?
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Tree VR
by Milica Zec, Winslow Turner Porter III
produced by Devon Baur
Perfumer: Laurent Le Guernec (IFF)
USA
This virtual-reality project transforms you into a rainforest tree. With your arms as branches and your body as the trunk, you’ll experience the tree’s growth from a seedling into its fullest form and witness its fate firsthand. In order to cement the sensation of being the tree, the experience is supplemented by scents that serve to embody and support the storyline.
Meet the finalists in the Independent Category
Meet the finalists in the Artisan Category