Enriching Flaws of Scent عطر עטרה A Guava Scent Collection

1.1 I Wanted it All to Disappear

Scent is one of the most difficult sensual experiences to trace. Many times, one of the first questions visitors to the Guava scent collection exhibitions asked me was “How long does the scent last in these bottles?” The answer is that this is impossible to estimate. The connection of scent to dissolution is what drew me to experiment with scent in the first place; I felt that the territorial dispute about the land east of the Mediterranean endlessly repeated itself: both nations claimed their right to reside on it for over a century, and I was exhausted hearing the same discussions over and over again. I wanted it all to disappear.

The local territorial dispute is chiefly based on questions of peoples’ origin and nationality, through which the current right to inhabit the land is attained. Since these two categories have led to an unsettled conflict, I was wondering whether different types of considerations might be part of the discussions about who should live on this land and how. The art-action of collecting scents offers to metaphorically evaporate materials that signify this territorial dispute and consequently establish a new relation to the conflict that is not exclusively based on nationality and origin.

Currently, the collection contains two categories of scent: one, a category of scents that are extracted from land taken from places in the center of the territorial conflict of the area; and two, a category of scents that are extracted from local crops that indicate the connection of inhabitants to the land they live on. Soil and locality are both main issues in this conflict that revolve around the right to reside on and inhabit it.

The Guava scent collection was first initiated as part of the platform in an exhibition^[11] at Beit Hagefen Gallery^[12] in the city of Haifa at the end of 2017. The first collection of scents for the exhibition was made from produce collected at the market in the gallery’s neighborhood, Wadi Nisnas, known for its Baladi ^[13] local products. Wadi Nisnas is a Palestinian village-like neighborhood in the city of Haifa, and in its center lies the only Arab market in town. The neighborhood is known to have poor housing conditions and is overcrowded, due to the low income of its residents and the ongoing neglect of the municipality, which is preserving it as an oriental slum.^[14] During the season of early winter, greens such as za’atar and sage can be found in the market next to oranges and lemons, and next to them, the season’s last batch of local guavas.

The guava fruit originates from Central America. Since 1526, it has been spread by man, birds and other animals to South America and the West Indies. It was adopted as a crop in Asia and in warm regions of Africa soon after it arrived. Egyptians have been growing guavas for a long time, and from Egypt, the fruit traveled to Palestine.^[15] The weather in the area suited the trees, and it quickly became a local crop.^[16] This makes the guava fruit an interesting case study of locality. The guava fruit was collected alongside other local crops of the season from the market. This collection of local produce concentrated on questions of locality: When and how does something or someone become local? What sort of intersections are generated between locality and rights over a piece of land?

The second scent collection was extracted during an exhibition of the Guava Platform in The Mamuta Art Centre in Jerusalem.^[17] It was completed by collecting soil samples from all the locations where the platform’s art-actions took place. These included the locations of the three films in the series, the vicinity of the online radio station used for the Guava Platform broadcast,^[18] and from the surroundings of the complex where the performances were presented. In all of these locations, there has been a long, ongoing conflict of the land. An example is Quneitra, where the film A day becomes takes place. The town of Quneitra was a crucial conflict point between Israel and Syria in the 1967 war.^[19] During the ongoing Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, Quneitra’s control moved back and forth between Israel and Syria, and today, the town itself is under Syrian authority, but large parts of the region are under Israeli rule.

The elusive character of scent affected the realization of the scent collection in two ways. Firstly, it influenced the process of extracting the scents from the substance. Secondly, it was part of the decision to invite visitors to the exhibitions to smell the extracted scents. As explained above, in Western thinking the volatile quality of scent was treated as a flaw. Philosopher G.W.F Hegel claims that by seeing and listening, what one hears and sees is left untouched, but by tasting and smelling one dissolves what is sensed: “We can smell only what is in the process of fading away.”^[20] After experiencing a certain scent, there is no possibility of re-capturing it and reflecting upon it. Because of its material volatility and smell, Hegel claims “[…] cannot have to do with artistic objects, which are meant to maintain themselves in their real independence and allow of no purely ^[21] sensuous relationship.”^[22] Hegel follows the convention that scents, because of their elusive character, are purely physical and therefore preclude the critical distance needed for his conception of art. Beauty in art, he claims, expresses a higher truth that is of both physical and conceptual nature. As the experience of a certain smell is maintained merely in the body, one therefore cannot reflect upon the scent after it has disappeared, and consequently, it cannot be considered as an art object. I want to show how scents’ material tendency to disappear is actually crucial for the metaphorical aspect of scent extraction and collection; and how the maintenance of scent in the body in fact contributes to the participants’ responsibility in taking part and positioning themselves in the local conflict.

The scents are extracted through a process of vaporization and condensation of water and oils. This type of process was chosen as it is one of the earliest and most elementary ways to collect scents using merely the basic elements of water and heat.^[23] This extracting method requires time. It is a long procedure that takes about two hours for each batch of material to be extracted, whether soil or local crops. The materials distillate throughout this long process by drawing out the scent together with all the water within the extracted materials. As a result, the extracted container of what used to be the material is drained and the substance is left to decline. For me, the extractor, it feels as though this process wrenches the liveliness out of the materials, taking the essentials out of the local crops or the soil leaving their materiality drawn-out, empty.

Since the extraction and collection process needs to be controlled carefully, I patiently watch the materials slowly pass away. With every batch, on a very small scale, the materials that make this conflict are dismissed. Alongside, metaphorically this process of collecting scents takes away the material ground of the local territorial conflict. In order to collect scent, the art-action metaphorically diminishes the land that inhabitants are fighting over, and the plants that symbolize the connection of the people living on it. By distilling local plants and soil only the scent of what they used to be is left. The course of action from material to scent dismisses the substance; it takes the land that people here are fighting over and the objects that symbolize locality and vaporizes them into scent. Metaphorically, the decline of the matters that are crucial in the local territorial conflict proposes to search for new ways for one to position themselves in the debate. It allows one to shift their standpoint about how to live on this land. It also invites, maybe, to include more perspectives than the importance of land and locality, other parameters that might be able to enrich the current debate and through them find ways to broaden the now stuck discussion. For me, this was a way to signify my despair about the ongoing territorial conflict. It was a way to metaphorically make the core material of the conflict disappear and ask whether a piece of land or the quarrel over who is “more” local are really as important to die or kill for?

The distilled and captured scents are put in small bottles marked with the name of the extracted material and its extraction date. The extracted material, what is left after extracting, declines. But this is only one aspect of how scents’ tendency to disappear was considered in the exhibition of the scent collection. The volatility of scents is a matter of time, and it is also related to the amount of times people open the bottles and smell their contents. When people repeatedly sniff a specific bottle, or the longer a bottle stays open, a lesser amount of scent molecules will last in it, and the intensity of smell in this bottle will reduce. The action of inhaling a scent from the bottles caused the one who smelled to take part and encourage the volatility of the collected scent. Visitors of the exhibition thus urge the collected scents to further evaporate the substance of soils and local plants. If the distilling process takes away the material of the extracted substance, then the act of sniffing the collected scents encourages the scent itself to disappear. If I, the extractor, metaphorically made what lies in the center of the local conflict diminish, now visitors might be seen as participants in this art-action by taking part in making what is left of these materials vanish. Whoever participated in smelling the collection’s scent during its exhibitions became symbolically responsible for carrying the vanishing leftovers of a certain material with them. In this art-action, the bodily experience that is stored in the smeller’s body becomes a way to metaphorically join my resistance to fight over a piece of land. The scent remains a bodily experience as Hegel claims, but in regard to him, I assert that even if this is the case, it can still be considered as part of an art-action. As a result of smelling, the smeller symbolically participates in dissolving the land and, consequently, may find new ways to reposition her/himself within the local territorial conflict.

Accordingly, my answer to the repeated question of how long the smell will last in the bottles would be: “It will last as long as the people who smelled it live to remember their experience.” Scent intertwines in one’s memory in both voluntary and involuntary ways, so that this experience of the exhibition has many potentials to reappear.^[24]

The Guava scent collection insists on materially and metaphorically containing this elusive character by extracting and collecting scents, and encouraging people to smell them during exhibitions of its installation. The collection works with the characteristic feature of scent to disappear in such a way that their disappearance becomes a vital part of the art-action itself, the volatility of scent becomes a dominant part of the art-action. This is why I propose the Guava scent collection as a metaphor for the dismissal of matters that are at the core of the conflict in this area: soil and local crops; connection to the land and the right to inhabit it. Opposed to the claims against scents’ volatility, in this art-action volatility is a productive and beneficial (both physically and conceptually) aspect. Within the art-action of the collection I assemble the materials that signify the parameters of the conflict in a process that metaphorically dismisses them into scent, an ever-changing volatile substance, and then I ask people to inhale and further dissolve it. These scents will now survive only within the visitors of the exhibition who smelled, who now metaphorically carry the remains of what is so forcefully fought upon here.

Photo by: Dor Kedmi, Guava at Mamuta art center, photo taken as part of Menofim Festival, 2018.

1.2 To Represent What is Not there

“I don’t recognize the smell of the land of Bir al Maksur^[25] at all, I tried all the bottles of scent from this soil, and I did not perceive anything,” Rahma told me when visiting the Guava exhibition^[26] in Jerusalem. “Do you think it is because I was born there and still live in the same village?” she asked and looked at me, as though I might have an explanation for her. Was the scent so familiar to her that she couldn’t sense it? Or did she not have any words to describe or recognize the scent of the area that she had lived in all of her life? Our conversation continued and opened questions of familiarity with the land. We discussed how people become accustomed to their place of birth and to where they live. We thought about places that are so well known to us that they become part of our body. Then, we thought about whether a land can be as well known to someone as their own body? Can it be like not having words to recognize and signify your own smell?

The lack of descriptive words or the gap between language and scents implies that it is very difficult for us to reduce and classify scents in specific terms. The American psychologist Trygg Engen claims that the association between smell and its terminology is weak, unsymmetrical and easily influenced by the verbal factor: “Odor perception is not organized lexically by nouns but around the similarity of objects causing odors and especially the contexts in which odors usually occur.”^[27] It is as though scent refuses to be incarnated into words and wants to remain a physical sensation, without form and structure.

The struggle to find words to describe what one smells affected the scent collection exhibition in two ways. Initially, prior to the first exhibition of the scents,^[28] my deliberation was how to exhibit them as part of an art installation. The main struggle was to determine whether the scents should be spread in the room or should be contained inside other objects. How many items should be part of the installation alongside the scents? In both cases, exhibiting and finding descriptive words for scents, there is the question of how to represent scent. Following the initial installation, I noticed that the scents stimulated conversations. I was keen to continue the talks and curious to find out what kind of socio-political discussion about the local territorial conflict that scents could promote, if ostensibly there are no descriptive words to do so? In the following, I will explain how these two impacts contributed to the installation and exhibition of the Guava scent collection.

The scent extraction produces a colorless, transparent liquid infused with the odor of the material from which it was extracted. It is a beautiful liquid at the edge of nothingness: clear water that reveals whether it contains something, only when it is actively sniffed. The elusive character of the extracted material urged me to merely spread the collected scents in it and to keep the exhibition room on the verge of emptiness. This sort of installation might emphasize the elusive character of scents. But, since I wanted the scents to be recognized and to signify the absence of a particular material they were extracted from, another urgent issue presented itself: the need to represent the scents in additional objects and items, such as bottles with the extracted perfumed liquid or papers that are soaked with the scents. In this way, the installation would enable the presented scents to be recognized with texts on the bottles or paper and would allow the addition of items and objects that are part of the extraction process to the room.

My endeavor was to set up an installation that is suitable for a physical experience of scents. But it was also to allow the sense of smell to induce and take part in rethinking the extracted materials and how to position oneself to what these materials might signify. Should other sensations like sight, sound, and touch be employed to bring forward these intentions, and if so, how? Or should there be nothing in the room but scent? Are the collected scents entrusted to speak for themselves? Or should additional objects support and articulate the presented odors? I found myself struggling to find the precise way to represent the scents in the installation. The questions that troubled me corresponded with the struggle to find terms and words to clarify and categorize the sense of smell and scents.

Scholar and poet Diane Ackerman describes the smell as the mute sense, the sense that has no words: “Lacking a vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasure and exaltation.”^[29] The words one uses to talk about scents, she claims, are terms for other things: floral, fruity, sweet, etc. One is only able to describe how a scent feels: pleasurable, sickening, and so on. The gap Ackerman notices between the lack of words and a concrete sensation is for her what gives smell a magical distance, a power without names that holds a secrecy within. In the visual arts, the presented objects usually represent themselves – they are what is exhibited – but when considering the installation of the scent collection this did not satisfy me. It felt as though in the exhibition the scents must be translated into additional objects. The clear-scented water needs to be collected into vessels with the names of the materials and extraction date written on them. In order for those to be sniffed by visitors, the vessels should be placed on shelves or in a cabinet. In addition, if a visitor in the gallery is asked to stay in the room and inhale the scents long enough to reflect upon them, a bench or some other piece of furniture should be present. As a result, the room would become crowded with many additional materials and objects: vessels, shelves or a cabinet, and sitting benches. All of these objects might be visually tempting, but would produce sensations that distract from the sense of smell. These objects then would stimulate additional senses and eventually take away the mere interaction with the scent that initially I wanted to exhibit. The transformation of scent into descriptive words that relate to other things, like Ackerman suggests, is similar to the attempt to transform scents into other objects by exhibiting them. In both cases, odor derives support from and relies on other elements to represent itself.

Eventually, I decided to get rid of as many objects as I could. The room was kept almost empty: shelves were built on the walls and painted in the same color, and small bottles were placed on the shelves. But after installing the scents in the room, I was again, not satisfied. Because of the strain between words and scents and as a result of the difficulty in representing the scents as themselves, I decided to not just exhibit the scents in the bottles. The difficulty in representing scents in the exhibition resulted in changing the character of the exhibition. It would no longer be an exhibition of the scent collection, but a live installation. An installation in which scents would be extracted and visitors would be invited to discussions that were induced by the smelled odors. The art-action of the scent collection changed its character as a result of the correlation with the non-descriptive aspect of the scent. It turned into a performative action of distilling and holding conversations, alongside an installation of the remains: bottles to be sniffed and an extraction table with the objects needed for the process.

Whenever I arrived at the exhibitions, I found that bottles had been moved between shelves, indicating the comfort and ease visitors were experiencing in the room while smelling the scents – possibly walking from place to place with the bottles. Making the exhibition hall functional gave visitors the opportunity to focus on the scents and, hopefully, to allow the experience of all the feelings and thoughts that the scents induced. The scent extraction performance routinely took place in both of the exhibitions of the scent collection. My presence and the scents in the room (and around the whole building) attracted visitors to the table and generated immediate conversations regarding the scents that spread around us. In the exhibitions of the scent collection, the performative extracting and distillation became part of the art-action alongside the conversations that were held. The conversations were both triggered by the sense of smell and were about the smelled scents. They evoked memories in visitors that questioned locality, regional living conditions, and feelings of residentship.

The conversations that were triggered by the scents dealt mainly with feelings of locality, memories of childhood and the sensation of belonging to a place. The conversations with me or whoever else was in the room were sometimes spontaneous responses to the smells. At other times, I intentionally led these conversations and invited groups or specific people to discuss these issues while extracting the scents. The lack of words – or the gap between the existing words and scent – provoked the visitors (mostly inhabitants of the area) to think and try to use a new language for a known discussion.

Most of the discussions about the territorial conflicted land east of the Mediterranean are conducted in an established language. Each inhabitant already has a certain line of reasoning at her disposal that will include words that are overused and imbibed with meaning. An example of this is the different names with which people indicate the area of the Palestinian Territories: people who are part of the settlers movement will call it Judea and Sumeraia, as it was called in the Bible during the kingdom of Israel; others, who believe this land belongs to Palestinians refer to the same area as the Israeli-occupied West Bank. These names immediately activate the conflict. Yet by engaging in the conversation on scent, visitors were challenged to find new words to enter, to take part in this old conflict, and to redefine their positions. The activation of the installation therefore turned the lack of descriptive words, or the gap between language and scent, into a beneficial characteristic for exhibiting the Guava scent collection and the sociopolitical conversation it promotes. In order to engage in a conversation through scent, there is a necessity to find unknown words or a new language, and this might allow for new understandings of and connections with the conflicted issues discussed around the scent collection.

Photo by: Daniel Hanoch, Guava at Mamuta art center, Jerusalem 2018.

1.3 Talking through Scents

“I hate the scent extracted from the land of Haifa” a visitor told me at the exhibition in Jerusalem,^[30] where scents from the lands were collected. “Doesn’t everyone?” she asked and was disappointed when I told her she was the first to share this sensation with me. Her physical reaction to the scent was so strong that she could hardly accept that it was only her particular experience of the scent. We began a conversation about memories of the places we lived in, just to find out she grew up in Haifa, miserably, waiting for the moment she could leave the city forever. Now, forty years after she left, she still does not think about moving back. Maybe this is why the scent disturbs her so deeply? Did the scent evoke her personal most intimate memories of Haifa?

Philosopher Walter Benjamin signifies that remembering through smell generates an experience of infinity. Experiencing an event is something finite, he claims, something that comes to an end, but remembering “[…] is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it.”^[31] Remembering is not merely an assembly of perception, of what was experienced, but it is also the action of the weaving of one’s memory.^[32] This weaving is a personal activity that recalls all that was not forgotten and succeeds in placing theses in a certain order. The weaving of memory tells us more than the experienced perception of occurrences, Benjamin says, because it reveals the way these experiences are recollected, the connections that are made between them, and how they remain with the one who remembers. But the sense of smell, Benjamin claims, brings to the surface another way to remember, it is an invitation to the “sea of lost time.”^[33] A smell opens up a whole, indefinite, and formless surrender into one’s personal memory. The visitor from Haifa was one of many visitors who have submitted themselves to the “sea of memories” that were induced by the scents of the exhibited collection and engaged in personal and intimate conversation with me.

Philosopher John Dewey states that empirical sensuous experience of the world, smelling for example, is usually considered subjective and therefore irrelevant to the development of knowledge: “Prestige goes to those who use their minds without participation of the body.”^[34] Dewey is pointing out that all of the senses, and the body in general, stood in the way of ideas and the process of the intellect. But smell, taste, and touch in particular were at odds with intellect and knowledge in the history of Western thought. Philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, refers to the sense of smell as being subjective. Because the idea observed from scent is “more a representation of enjoyment than of cognition of the external object,”^[35] different people might be differently affected by a given scent, and often cannot come to an agreement about it. Kant found that there are no commonly agreed-upon concepts that one could use to communicate the sense of smell. In other words, odors, he claims, tend to be described through personal references rather than general terminology. The subjectiveness of the sense of smell is what made this sense untrustworthy in philosophical or intellectual arguments. The sensuous experiences that were induced by scents in the exhibitions invited visitors’ subjectiveness to become part of the conversations. Most of the discussions led immediately to a personal memory connected to the smelled material. As a result, we held intimate subjective discussions that responded to the scents and were aroused by them in each visitor.

In both of the exhibitions, the sociopolitical conversations that the scents induced indeed were subjective and intimate. Visitors immediately expressed to which land they felt connected and to which they did not. Many times these feelings developed into conversations about locality and the right to inhabit this land from their personal-physical, interior standpoint. The scents of local produce turned into a unique and personal conversation about the visitors’ thoughts and feelings, which then initiated a conversation that included their childhood memories, cooking preferences and intimate connections to the plants and crops that grow around them. Recent science-related research found a strong connection between the sense of smell and memory, as described in the famous Proustian memory effect, which regards scents as particularly powerful in triggering autobiographical memory cues.^[36] Studies show that odor-cued autobiographical memories are qualitatively richer and reliably superior in the amount of detail yielded. These results strongly support the proposal that scent is especially effective in provoking past experience. Scholar and poet Diane Ackerman equally claims that smell can take a person directly into the center of a memory: scents open “a route that carries us nimbly across time and distance.”^[37] I argue that the subjective sociopolitical conversations opened up the normally narrowly enclosed discussion of such conflicted questions in this area I live in. The subjective sensations of the visitors stood in opposition to the more objective terms that are commonly used in sociopolitical discussions. The conversation through the scents disconnected their feelings and thoughts from the general discourse and changed into a distinctive and intimate one.

Locality and inhabiting land are usually discussed through general terms and concepts. These sorts of discussions rely on the communal identities, like historical and religious kinship based on nationality, as being part of a certain nation. They promote identifying only with people who are in their own group of identification, and exclude people who are not. Freud claims that civilization imposes on society cultural ideals, general concepts that demand to ignore subjective variations: “The first consequence of civilization was that even fairly large numbers of people could now stay together in a community.”^[38] In civilizations, he claims, developments of society could progress smoothly and people had better control of the world around them. Since the sense of smell is a reminder of a time before culture took over and before man gathered in communities, it was devalued. The suppression of the sense of smell signifies, according to Freud, the repression of subjective desires. Smelling is a reminder of when man was uncivilized and not organized in communities that might protect common needs. Following Freud’s argument, the subjective qualities of the conversation held in the exhibition pay attention to the visitors’ distinctive and personal desires. They place a plurality of identities at the center of discussion, challenging the supposedly homogeneous perceptions of the area’s inhabitants.

These plural identities are not merely a sum of the subjective characteristics of each of the participants. But scents and the sense of smell are directed in the exhibition to the most intimate feelings of belonging and relating to a piece of land. Seeking there in undefined territories words and connections. Benjamin in his discussion around Proust^[39] defines two qualities of memory, a voluntary one and an involuntary one. Voluntary memory is in the service of the intellect, it connects us with the past as we recall it happening. But scent, he claims, could be associated with involuntary memory, where the past is situated beyond reach and our encounter with it is random. This unexpected memory is part of one’s self in a more personal way than the dichotomic division between objective and subjective. It is something that is part of our body and self that percolates beneath this division. This quality suggested to the conversations the possibility to be discussed from beyond not merely constructed homogeneous conceptions, but also potentially avoid the barriers of identity politics.

The conversations in the exhibitions took into consideration the people who live on this land. This suggestion is in correlation with Philosopher’s Hannah Arendt definition of plurality: “the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”^[40] Arendt states that plurality is a central condition for human action. The fact that all people belong to the same species, but yet each one of them is a different individual, is what sets the ground for human action. Accordingly when basing the conversation on nationality, one enters a discussion with the set of values and preferences that promote the political interests of the state. But when one joins the conversation from a subjective point of view the discussion can open in new directions. Their personal experiences are a source of additional connections to the land they live on, which are not merely based on nationality or other general concepts. Participants voiced their needs and desires of living here, and as a result, they acquired a more influential role as themselves, more than is usually asked of them in collective political interest. They were invited to take an active part in independently thinking about how to live on this land.

The intimate and personal conversations that were part of the scent collection exhibition invoked this plurality in order to bring in new ideas and find new paths to entangle the long and ongoing territorial conflict. This might encourage people to take responsibility for their actions and beliefs, even after the smell dissolves. Responsible for carrying the memory on, a memory from local plants and a conflicted land, that, as time goes by, will not be as it is remembered now.

Photo by: Yael Messer, عطر עטרה a guava scent collection, Beit HaGeffen Gallery, 2017.