|
Artists Main Programme Parallel Programme Workshop Performance Festival A-Ζ |
| biennale mission biennale shop |
| Hellenic Ministry of Culture
State Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki Center of Contemporary Art Visual Arts in Greece Art Editions |
|
|
|
| Macià Oswaldo Born in 1960 in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Lives and works in the UK. Ten Notes for a Human Symphony As implied in the title, this symphony of human scents is a selection of smell interpretations taking ten different ethnic groups from around the world. Arranged in the form of a smell symphony, these different textures and notes of the human scent awake our palette of senses and give space for a different way of thinking. The issue of how the brain represents the external world is not only at the center of modern art, but at the very core of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. All organisms have evolved a mechanism to recognize sensory information in the environment and transmit this information to the brain where it must be processed to create an internal representation, a map of the external world. The existence of a map in the brain immediately implies that different species -and even different individuals within the species- will represent the world in different ways. Indeed, studies on the evolution of sensory perception reveal the important fact that each species lives in its own unique sensory world of which other species may be partially or totally be unaware of. The objective of this project is to confront the knowledge of the sensorial perception of human smell and to present it as a “social grammar” or means of communication among us. An intimate but invisible language subordinated to particular notions of culture. Equally, the project wants to illuminate and to challenge most of what is accepted as knowledge linked to olfactory sensations such as: smell quality, odour discrimination and odour barriers. Something we could possibly describe as olfactory morality or odour of sanctity, in religious terms, and ultimately move the audience’s vocabulary of smell from the level of like/dislike to a more thoughtful approach; placing the viewer inside an olfactory discourse. The visualization of the project will be an arrangement of ten mechanical curtains, which will roll and unroll quietly. In each one there will be a different smell composition or “note” to orchestrate the total symphony (see diagrams). Oswaldo Maciá  Download CV |  Ten Notes for a Human Symphony, Map, 2008 Ten Notes for a Human Symphony, Sketch, 2008 Calumny, 2007 Surrounded in tears, 2004 |
Sponsors - Media Sponsors
