Making The Body Think – Exhibition at The Institute of Art and Olfaction
by Miguel Matos from Fragrantica
On December 9th, 2017, the Institute for Art and Olfaction will present an exhibition titled Making the Body think, my own personal Scent Art project (as curator) based on the work of the philosopher Maria João Ceitil. After its first presentation in Almada, Portugal, at the Casa da Cerca Contemporary Arts Centre, I was invited to show it in Los Angeles, this time with a larger number of artists involved. Nine perfumers, from famous noses to new talents, are represented with scent artworks in this exhibition: Anatole Lebreton (France), Antoine Lie (France), Antonio Alessandria (Italy), Antonio Gardoni (Italy), Fulvio Ciccolo (Italy), Lucas Gracia (Spain), Oliver Valverde (Spain), Pissara Umavijani (France) and Sven Pritzkoleit (Germany). To these, the experimental vocal works of Ondina Pires (Portugal) were added.
“The invisible line of a smell that is maddening” is the motto for an interpretation of an excerpt of Pôr o Corpo a Pensar, a Ph.D. thesis published by Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, by Maria João Ceitil. This book is mainly about rejecting the whole line of rationalist philosophy, proposing instead a subjective way of thinking, based on the body, on sensations and on the animalistic side of human existence. The book’s chosen excerpt, which is the base for the project, is about the smell as the most primal connection we have to the world and to each other. This excerpt was separated and decontextualized from the rest of the work and delivered to several niche perfumers, who were asked to translate the sensations caused by the words into smell.
For the exhibition in Los Angeles, the six existing perfumers are joined by Oliver Valverde, Pissara Umavijani, and Fulvio Ciccolo – developing new scents for the LA version of the show. Following the line of the organic and sensorial patterns, performer Ondina Pires was invited to create a sound installation, based on vocal and percussive records. The audio translation of the olfactory sensations, under different rhythms and intensities, followed an improvised, experimental and primitive structure.
The best way to follow a #brief, is to not follow it. If i had to creat an animalic #scent, it would have been something already seen, because animalic is already seen. I embraced to modernity, the innovation and twisted it to the new concept of beauty. plastic. fake. Making your body think for real. See you at Los Angeles exhibition on Dec 9.
Fulvio.
These smells aim to summon a dimension of the body through what Maria João Ceitil calls the body’s most primitive, basic, unavoidable, and concupiscent animality: the smell of the body. The idea of the project Making The Body Think is to establish an exhibition that intersects the realms of art, philosophy, and smell. The works created by these perfumers can even be impossible to use in one of those, but they are able to evoke it. They are not perfumes, they are olfactory artworks. They are smells of the body, smells of love, smells of eroticism, smells of the instinct. My intention is not only to pay tribute to the author and to her magnificent work but also to expand its scope, working upon it, reconnecting the thread that was suddenly cut by her death.