What stories could be told if, instead of looking, hearing, or reading, we just smelled our way through life? Can scents offer us different narratives about the world?

As we don’t have any means to preserve scents and smells from the prehistoric era, it is solely left to our imagination. These scents are unarchivable, but yet, they are probably stored somewhere within us, bodily. The scent memory passes as one collective organic archive through generations and generations, via soil, water and various organisms.

Heavily fueled by the ambition to free ourselves from human-oriented perspectives of the world, holo- tried to broaden their perspective on scents by focusing on other species.

If the prehistoric stages of the world had their scents preserved, what would they smell like? Holo- tried to rebuild these narratives via their own scent fossils. Attempting to capture the world life cycle in five stages from the appearance of the very first organism until the very ending of the planet, holo- designed five unique scents to represent this cycle; to get closer to the world’s scent memory. A complete cycle that can be repeated over and over and in which humanity constitutes only a small fragment of the whole. These scents were presented in the custom-made glass censer, which was set in movement during a performance by Ondřej Kubeš.

Holo- proposed whether this ever-repeating cycle of five scents cannot work within the exhibition as some sort of universal, more-than-human “wisdom.” The universal story of emergence, transformation and decay translated via scents. If non-human actors could pass on their wisdom; if they had their own form of spirituality, or their own values and morals–it could probably take the form of scent. Bodily, intimate, ungraspable, yet powerful. Scent, which often works as an equivalent to language for different species. The visual motifs that blur the lines between what comes across as scientific and what comes across as metaphorical is visualised on the standing altar which works as a space for pondering.

/borosilicate glass, five custom-made scents, metal construction, engraved glass and plaster tiles, glass objects, powder images on the floor

Installation accompanied by performance by Ondřej Kubeš