My work focuses on the obscure area of overlapping inhabitants and how sense of smell plays crucial role. During my study in a Master degree at the Dutch Art Institute, my research into how olfactory sense, investigates smells through the act of orientation/ disorientation, marking territory and being deterritorialized though shifting smells.
In Western society, hegemony of vision and hearing is evidential. To release myself from the despotic reign of the eyes, I refuse to give visual a priority in my research and writing, however, never turn blind eyes. By bringing my nose to the forefront, I claim that smell/scent/olfactory too, play a crucial role in orientating oneself, claim the space (territory) and communities’ formation and transmission.
Traces - Spices became an embedded element in our daily life. Although, cloves, cinnamon or nutmeg appear in various recipe books nowadays, these spices have traveled alongside with colonialism. The result of these journey seems to spiced up the food and beverage widely, however, we cannot begin to think of the result without learning the source of these spices, its journeys and its costs. This performance explore relation between personal experiences, political tastes and their connection to everyday life performance. How can we Increasing the awareness of the space that surrounds us and be more conscious about smells and movement of air and compose and decompose the elements of the space?
This project is a part of a larger research; Common Scents A Social Sense of Smell: Orientation, Territory and the Evidence of Beings.
Who Moves and Who Doesn’t - With a lack of smell, I am lost. Now I am in search of smell to self-reorient and deterritorialized. Through this thesis I attempt to investigate the capability of smell and its relationship to bodies and societies, how smell orients us through lines of history and how it participates in the revolutionary act of becoming “civilized”.
Inspired by In the Wake by Christina Sharp and the use of her own autography as a base to resemble theories which are evidential throughout her life. I use my own narratives as a starting point to bring together narratives which are selected by three main themes; smell that orients, smell that dis-places/disorientates and smell as evidence. These narratives guided by ideas from the sociology of smell through to group orientation negated by smell, smell as an invisible boundary that dissolves territory lines, how deodorization is used as a method of colonization and the possibility of re-odorization as a method for reterritorializing space or ground and how smell can show itself as evidence of beings.
Translation Between Threshold - Performers: Sanne Kabalt, Nemo Koning, Pitchaya Ngamcharoen
When we are longing for familiar taste to the tongue, we recreate them. The act of longing to the taste, the smell of our comfort food is not at all uncommon.
I explores the taste-scape of Northern Thai food base on one’s memory in relation to its limitation in another land. By putting other two cooks to the task of cooking and preparing the food following a direction from a Skype video call, they are challenged to create a tastes unknow to them. The audiences will be invited to experience a sensorial meal which bring home to some and transport others elsewhere.
Connected Tongues - Remember how you tasted kaki for the first time?
Or when you were surprised by how spicy ginger can be?
Coming from a different part of the world, I found shared experiences of food. The experiences which connect between bodies. A touch of the land and its energy which transfer through food is a direct contact of substance travelling through the body. From the first touch on the lips and tongue, the texture one feels in the mouth when food is being chewed, and swallowed into stomach and digesting system. The nutrition that each substance provides to the body is an internal touch. Food and taste can also touch a person’s feeling and evoke memories. To be touched by a taste of food is an incomparable experience.
Rules Exchange - I put myself in the room which usually being taken over by monkeys. Residents in this room had experienced these monkeys stealing food and cloths, making noise and jumping on the roof. This particular room located along one of the monkeys’ primary routes. The tenants are warned to keep their belongings in the cupboard to prevent the stealing. I, however, lived my life as normally as I could without following those warning. I paid the consequences with instant noodle, cooking oil, a bottle of salt, fresh vegetable, glasses and some art materials.
Are they in my room or I am in theirs?
Calling Lost Brothers - Calling Lost Brothers is a project which I aimed to visualize an animal’s unnoticed and unperceived territory. I am interested in the overlapping layers of human living space and that of animals in cities. I have been exploring the area I have been living in for a period of time, attempting to perceive it through different eyes. In my project, I asked ants to do so for me. Why? They have many eyes and are very nosy.
