“The production of a new culture requires a use of time towards which communicative capitalism manifests profound hostility. Most of the social energy is sucked into the vortex of late capitalist labor and its grandiose simulation of productivity […] If there is a future, it will depend on our ability to recapture those uses of time that neoliberalism has tried to exclude and make us forget”
—Mark Fisher, Our wish is nameless. Political writings, Minimum Fax, 2020.
Every day, for a couple of hours, we walk around our neighborhood calling, organizing the work, discussing how to do it. During this time we stop to “register” the smells that make up these collections. In this sort of archives there is therefore the result of time and thought dedicated to designing not only these but also future works.
For the first edition of the “Biennolo” exhibition in Milan we have created a site specific work, consisting of two series of 25 “smells” each, collected on February 27-28, 2019 during our inspection of the former Cova factory and on the occasion of the conference press presentation of the exhibition.
To carry out the installation, we collected pieces of asphalt and small stones along the streets: to these we tied transparent elastic threads to which strips of tissue paper are hung.
On this extremely volatile and light paper, the descriptions of the smells are printed together with the geolocation of each one. The stones are fixed to the ceiling and the strings with the cards hang towards the floor, fluttering or quivering at the slightest breath of air.
Altogether up to now we have created seven different series of 25 smells each, which were presented in different exhibitions between 2017 and 2019.
“Odori” is also part of the series of works that we have defined as “decelerations”.
The smells are written so that there is no “other” subject than the reader. The first person who describes them does not have a gender, he is studiously anyone despite being an extremely intimate voice.
Smells can be sounds, colors, abstractions, forms of memory, aspirations, characters.
On the occasion of exhibitions and workshops we involve other people making the “Odori” device a collaborative process as well as site specific.
“ODORS” AS A COLLABORATIVE PROCESS
For example on the occasion of the workshop held at the Catholic University of Milan in autumn 2019.
On this occasion, we invited students to slow down and try to describe the smells they perceive every day when they go to the University or move within its (really large) spaces.
A sort of challenge to “functionalization” posed precisely in a university where economics is traditionally taught. We conducted a peripatetic “anti-workshop”, pausing together to smell places and moments just as we tackled topics such as the concept of Duchampian idleness and that of biocapitalism. All the smells described by the participants were then reworked and used in the installation.
Contributed by
Premiata Ditta