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 also dream in scent – once I am awake the ghostly smell lingers for days.

Olfactory hallucination, also known as phantosmia, is a condition caused by the ability to smell odours when actual stimuli are not present. This is a poorly understood phenomenon associated with a range of diagnosis. Some studies have shown that phantosmia can be caused by neurological conditions such as head injuries, strokes, Parkinson’s disease, seizures, or brain tumours, amongst others. It has also been linked to symptoms of mental illnesses or disorders such as depression, bipolar or psychotic disorders. The absence of any pathological or psychological symptom in my experiences of phantosmia compels my questioning of how might place, ancestry, and spiritual ways of knowing challenge a constant Western's pathologising and subsequent objectifying of who we are and what constitutes our subjectivities.

Augúrio and the smells that were not there uses the nuances of my biological being as a vehicle to understand crossovers and divides that may exist between pathologies – psychological and cognitive – and diverse, hybrid cultural contexts. With the making of this work, I begin to understand that at its core, biological systems are fundamentally the same, and are built to perform the same tasks, human to human. However, I am also beginning to understand that the distribution of olfactory receptors in the epithelium, just as the distribution of photoreceptors in the retina, may be and ultimately are unique to individuals, just like fingerprints. The same way that sensations and perceptions are also distinctively experienced.