agustine zegers. Image courtesy the artist.
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Facilitated by olfactory artist agustine zegers, Sympoietic Breath invites a deeper awareness of how smells reveal our embeddedness in systems of ecological collapse and emergence. With one inhale, our body awakens to an incorporated cosmos. Ancient molecular exchanges, traces of industry, traces of plant breath, and traces of decaying life all transit through the pleura of our lungs. Odorant molecules also join in, entering the continuous lubricated movement of our breaths. These smelly compounds reveal the ever-enfolding complexities of air, allowing us to decode its composition through our olfactory bulbs and opening us up to intelligences at the scale of the invisible. As such, our sense of smell – animated by the breath – can be activated as a collaborative sensemaking tool for an ever-shifting planet.
Participants will be introduced to ecological and olfactory terminology and will be guided through an olfactive exercise to help us put collaborative breathing and smelling into practice.
OPEN LAB invites artists and scholars to facilitate theoretical discussions and embodied workshops, providing a platform for practice-based inquiry and creative exchange.
This program will take place virtually via Zoom. Auto-generated captions will be available.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
agustine zegers (b. Santiago, Chile) is an olfactory artist and student of atmospheric biopolitics. Their work attends to the nourishing and noxious transcorporealities we share as inhabitants of Earth, offering forms of communion with ecological collapse at the scale of the molecule and breath. Their work has scented and been exhibited across the Global North and South at venues such as Prairie, Chicago (2024); 52 Walker, New York (2024); the Chilean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Venice (2022); Lagos, CDMX (2020); Galería Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo (2018); and Galería Metropolitana, Santiago (2015).