2022, scent and scent diffuser

“Abyss (2022) evokes the ocean, the plantation, the boat, the body. This scent is made naturally using smoking and distillation practices by the artist. The work’s title is taken from an English translation of Édouard Glissant’s writing ‘The Open Boat’ in Poetics of Relation, which speaks to the ongoing impacts of slavery and the movement of people over oceans. In the artist’s words: “This work is part of an ongoing effort to create an archive that sits against the traditional colonial archive that seeks to tell my familial history. Rather than looking at the archive through this traditionally western lens—I think about how a decolonised culturally specific archive is experienced. Through the intangible and sensory, and acknowledging intergenerational histories—through the body, through descendants of these histories.”” – This language that is every stone, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2022)

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