26.10.2021 – 17-22h /1.11.2021/5.11.2021
The Immersive installation
What do you do with a smell that you are not familiar with and that you perhaps do not like (immediately)? What happens to displaced (food) smells? Can smells coexist? What can coexistence smell like? Smells remind us of what was left behind; smells are integral to (re)building feelings of home; but smells (marked in terms of culture and class) are also central to politics of exclusion, conflicts, and as symbols of resistance. The installation consisting of a selection of scents, quotes, visuals and photographs, invites the audience to engage with visuals and smells in relation to Loss, Rebuilding, Resistance and Coexistence; to listen and move to the smells in guided improvisations or talk to us about smells, migrations, racisms and coexistence.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS
The installation includes the following photographs
Rahul Dhankani – Nomadic Shepherds tend to their flock. Borderland between India and ‘Tibet’.
Rahul Dhankani – Migrant workers smoke ‘bidis’ while cooking in their tent along an under-construction Himalayan highway.
Emanuele Occhipinti – Man cooking in his backyard. Kosovo.
Georgina Alice Woolveridge – Yemen bazaar.
Alaa Elkamhawi – Detention Center, Germany.
“The daily life of asylum seekers during the Corona pandemic in February 2020 at Speyer Refugee camp, where asylum seekers have to live for a period of up to 18 months, and despite the strict procedures in Germany at this time and before the vaccine was available to refugees, the camp administration was putting up to 6 people together in one room without any possibility to keep distance and without providing any tools for sterilization or to prevent infection and without any right to object.” – photographer’s note.
The human mind processes visuals and smells in a very similar manner and our deepest memories are an interpolation of visuals, smells and sounds that combine with emotional memory.
The smell of death is one that is most unique and powerful, it is the distinctness of it and how it lingers in the back of our nostrils that feeds into its emotional impact, just as the visual of a dead body remains imprinted in our eyes.
The smell of our mum’s cooking always comes along with a picture of her face, the aroma of our favourite restaurant back home with the memories of our friends with whom we would eat there.
Raw meat, a carcass, a fish market or bazaar, a Smokey bar, a piss stained alley, the sheets on our partners bed, salty tears rolling down ours cheeks, the seat at our regular hair dresser, the time you burnt the toast on a rainy morning, taking the subway to work, sitting in a library – every tiny moment of significance is associated with a visual and a smell, and the manner in which we experience those memories is a blurry combinations two as each of them fill the gaps of the other.
The intention of this small collection of images is to being together visuals that invoke the sensory response of smell while also representing the diversity of smells across varying cultures and geographies.
Images are from India, Yemen, Kosovo and Germany demonstrate that a geography plays an active role in how a smell is perceived – the smell of meat in Calcutta is not the same as the smell of meat in Greenland, the smell of a hospital in Syria is not the same as that of a hospital in Australia.
We often take for granted the miraculous interaction of our senses and how they play an active and participatory role in informing each other’s experienced memory, more so as we move and carry those memories from one part of the world to another.
Curatorial Statement –
Rahul Dhankani, curatorial advisor photography, SMELLS OF COEXISTENCE