MOMENTA Biennale de l'image 17th edition, Sensing Nature
Curated by Stefanie Hessler, in collaboration with Camille Georgeson-Usher, Himali Singh Soin and Maude Johnson
8 September to 24 October, 2021
The scent of the almost-extinct Agalinis acuta was captured as chemical data,
analyzed in a lab, and synthetically reproduced by the artist in collaboration with a global flavors company (IFF). In the wild, the flower releases too small a trace of volatile compounds (smelly chemicals) to be perceptible to the human nose. I wanted to smell her.
The scent is named Our Day Will Come - after the 1963 Ruby and the Romantics song.
"Our day will come
If we just wait a while
No tears for us
Think love and wear a smile
Our dreams have magic because
We'll always stay
In love this way
Our day will come (Our day will come, our day will come)"
Music travels in the air and in memory similarly to scent.
This scent, traveling as vapor through silicone tubing, sustains the life of Schizachyrium scoparium grass. In the wild, the flower attaches its roots to this grass, in order to seep nutrients. Composed of a series of Corporeal Downloads (slip + slide + sweat + tremor + quiver), the installation A WET CHEMICAL TRACE inverts this parasitic relationship. This speculative post-extinction garden continues the existence of this being - the Aganlis acuta, downloaded as data and spread, now wet, through the gallery space...a being previously wedded to it's vegetal state, dependent on the wind to propagate, now rendered as scent, as floating compound - now moves through walls and through bodies... with the global art distribution mechanism as the new wind.
The steel was all bent cold by the artist... a physical exercise, an imprint of my body on the steel... and the steel leaving imprints on my body and me..then other bodies come into the picture (flower, grass, grow lights and the factory workers that make them, and so on...) the assemblage enacting precisely because of the tension of each element vying with and against each other...
I have been working for many years with this one plant,
the Agalinis acuta – the only federally protected endangered plant growing in New York state. I captured it’s scent (which is imperceptible to humans in the wild) using mass spectrometry - in collaboration with a global corporation - IFF - and together we re-created it for human perception (a kind of chemical translation – never identical to the original). IFF owns the intellectual property of this scent, but I own (or rather, guide?) the soul of this de-vegetalized flower's being.
Using the scent I created the performance All That Is Used, Broken, Lost... (originally commissioned by Jake Yuzna for the Museum of Art & Design exhibition NYC Culture Makers). I ended up travelled the world making performances, sharing with audiences the flower’s scent.
While at an exhibition in Shanghai (Seeds of Time, curated by Yongwoo Lee and Hans Ulrich Obrist) I realized – this plant that is every year dwindling in numbers, and biologists can’t even get to successfully grow 3 meters away from its original place – I am now traveling around the world, in it’s chemical version. If we accept my proposition that the scent of the plant is another instantiation of its being, albeit in a different material form... then the global art distribution system becomes a more powerful force than wind in spreading it's "seed" or at least in continuing the existence of this life form, spreading it around the world. What does this mean?
I made this body of work in response to this question. This speculative garden, presented in a windowless cement space, references the materials used in the original scent capture, as well as flower organ and human body organs. The connective tissue is the water vapor scented with Our Day Will Come: a wet chemical trace.
The installation also includes a film, titled WET CHEMICAL TRACE. A collage of images depicting the mass spectrometry moment of scent capture of the Agalinis acuta, the artist attempting to capture a wild frog, the BIOSPHERE 2's attempt to capture the entire earth's ecosystems, a visit to the healthiest community of Agalinis acuta in the world (in the backyard of Andy Warhol's Montauk residence). It is overlayed with text, written from the perspective of the flower, now divorced from its vegetal body, spreading around the world.
Corporeal Download (Slide)
Steel, glass, clay, silicone, magnets, laboratory clamps, Schizachyrium scoparium, grow light, humidifier, water vapor, custom scent Our Day Will Come
Corporeal Download (thrum)
Steel, glass, clay, silicone, magnets, electric cord, laboratory clamps, Schizachyrium scoparium, blacklight, humidifier, water vapor, custom scent Our Day Will Come