Augúrio.
and the smells that were not there.
2021- ongoing

the boy ate the fruit. one sensual bite after the other.
he tore through the cantaloupe flesh.
the sound, sweet and cold, of naked flesh.
teeth sinking in. the pungent sweetness is visceral, violent.
the eyes devour it too. the wanting. the waiting. the longing.
the smells and the sounds of a savage force.

I can smell things when they are not there.

I grew up in Brazil in a Roman-Catholic family. We went to mass, prayed, and performed all Catholic rituals. I was fascinated with the singing priest, I was madly in love with altar boys, and I was made to believe that anything involving the human body equated to sins, shame and guilt and were to be avoided at all costs. Yet, behind the Catholic facade, my family members' religious interests truly lay elsewhere: in the Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda, in macumba.

My curiosity about these sensorial experiences was piqued during a short stint as a psychology student in 2021. I was enrolled in a summer of neuroscience, and when I mentioned my ability to smell odours without stimuli, it was mostly dismissed as olfactory hallucinations. I was given a list of potential causes for my 'condition', such as seizures, brain tumours, bipolar disorder, early-onset Alzheimer's, and other symptoms that did not apply to my condition at all. While I understand that this 'pathologizing' of my ability to smell things without stimuli references one truth and one way of knowing, in Brazil the line separating the spiritual from the human is paper thin. As such, some 'hallucinatory' experiences rather than being perceived as pathologies, they can be integrated as being multisensorial perceptions, and recognised as knowledge and as a product of cultural and religious/spiritual backgrounds in addition to perceived phenomena.

This project uses nuances of my biological being as a vehicle to question absolutist notions of truth and rigid ways of knowing. The making ritual for Augúrio entails my 'stealing' from works created by long-dead people from colonising countries. The 'stealing' being my photographing fragments of these works and layering them into new images. The layering insinuates that truth and knowledge are more nuanced and diverse than often-privileged Eurocentric notions. The visual fragments are redolent with sensorial inputs such as erotic touch and scent while flirting with Christian beliefs of the body as a carrier of sins.

At its core, Augúrio attempts to offer alternative composites that legitimise the often-subjugated truth and knowledge of the colonised; a composite pungent with knowledge born in a fissure that neither colonialism nor Christianity could penetrate.