Josephine Condemi
Smelling a work of art: for almost a decade, Karola Braga has been experimenting with olfactory paths for those who enjoy her works. On her return from the Alula desert in Saudi Arabia, we met her
Sand, rock, camels, dogs. Sage, mistletoe, spices, petrichor1. Sweat, incense, urine, rose, perfumed volatile oils. The desert is many smells, emanating from the living and non-living beings that compose it. The wind drags and mixes these smells in turn for kilometers. And they reach us, human beings, directly to the limbic system, the oldest part of the brain linked to the satisfaction of primary needs: eating, avoiding dangers, reproducing. Powerful and fleeting, smells immerse us in an atmosphere and then disappear, marking the border between past, present and future. What if they became part of a work of art?
Karola Braga has been working on this type of olfactory experimentation for a decade: for Desert X AiUla 20242, the land art exhibition that take place in the Saudi Arabian desert from 2020, she created Sfumato, a work that recalls the connection of the area with the ancient incense route.
Karola Braga (1988) is a Brazilian artist and olfactory researcher. After a two-year Studio Arts Intensive at the National Academy School of Fine Arts in New York, she graduated in “Visual Poetics” at the University of São Paulo (ECA/USP) and got a master in “Fine Arts” at the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP). She works on the olfactory sphere as a gateway to emotions and stories and on the relationship between smell and presence/absence and memory/schema. She has exhibited in Saudi Arabia, Brazil, France, Iran, Switzerland. She was part of the residency programme of the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2017) and the Kooshk Residency in Teheran (2018). She won the Kooshk Artist Residency Award (2018) and was a finalist in the CIFO Grants & Commissions Program (2020, Miami) and “Bloom Weihenstephaner” (2019, Cologne), “Sadakichi Award” (2023, Los Angeles).
Her official websiteHow did you get into olfactory experimentation?
I have always been very passionate about the world of smells, but the beginning of artistic experimentation was due to a personal episode: almost ten years ago now, while attending the the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation, I fall in love with someone who was living in New York. And then I would always ask myself: how can I make myself present there, even if I am not there? How can I evoke my presence without being excessive, intrusive? At the time I was using a very particular perfume and I knew that people connected me to that smell, so I decided to send a letter to this person in New York with my perfume. At that time I was doing my dissertation and my mentor encouraged me to think about the relationship between smell and presence, between smell and memory.
What was the title of your undergraduated thesis project?
Make me present, in English, with a double meaning: “make me present”, in your memory through smell, but also “make me a gift“, if we translate “present” as “gift”.
The installation was an atomiser that diffused the smell in the room, and after this experience I realised that people are not used to thinking about smell in an artistic context: since then I have always left clues that smell is part of the artwork.
If you think about it, in a contemporary art museum any visual element can be associated with a work of art: the same applies to hearing, but not to smell. At the same time, the visual element serves to make the work travel: we are doing this interview because in the editorial office you have seen the images from the Internet, right? But you don’t know what smells we are talking about.
One of your earliest works is Deve haver um poema que fale sobre nós3 in which scented tiles engraved with characters inspired by cuneiform writing tell a love story between two women. Next, in pandemic, A vida não é um mar de rosas4 was constructed through an expanse of scented plaster roses and the phrase ‘I am sorry about that’. Do the inscriptions also serve to give a frame of meaning to the works? Because smell is also cultural, for one people it means something, for another something else…
This is so: for example when I went to Iran, and it was my first time in the Middle East, I discovered how is different the meaning we attach to the scent of roses. In the West we associate it with a delicate smell, which in turn refers to feminine beauty. There, on the other hand, it refers to the prophet Muhammad, has a sacred meaning and often fills mosques, which are frequented by men. The result, when I was there, was that people would ask me why I smelt like a man!
Each smell can represent something different for each culture but also for each person, depending on the experiences they have had and the memories they possess: in this sense, each work is very open to different readings. The clues are in the meaning that a smell has for me, but to you it may lead elsewhere: a smell that to me may simply be tangerine, to you may remind you of childhood. The smell of Carnival for us in Brazil has a meaning, if I present the same work in Italy it will have a different meaning.
About the work Lembranças de um baile de carnaval 5: why did you select eight different smells and how did you keep them from mixing, if they are all in the same room?
It is always a challenge. I thought about the fact that when you arrive at a place, you feel the atmosphere full of the smells of the activities taking place there. In this case, I thought about the interior of a place during carnival balls at the beginning of the 20th century, where people could smoke cigarettes, smell urine, drink liquor or inhale ethyl alcohol (a drug that was called ‘Lança-perfume’), and where odours were also due to people’s clothes and bodies, yesterday as today.
I put different compositions of some of these smells in ceramic bottles, and each bottle refers to the smell of a different carnival character. As if you walked into a room, smelled the entire room but then approached each body/bottle. In this way, the visitor is invited to go through different stages of an olfactory journey.
While in the desert, how did you work in the open space? And why did you call the work Sfumato?
AlUla, in Saudi Arabia, was a stop on the incense route. In DesertX AlUla, I wanted to recreate the smell of the incense trade. When I thought of the title of the work, I aimed to bring something that was part of art history into the realm of perfumes: the word sfumato recalls the smoke of incense, but it is also a painting technique where colors merge, just as the smell merges with the atmosphere. In this sense, it is as if I had painted with this smell. When Marcelo Dantas, one of the two curators of DesertX AlUla, told me in Los Angeles about the 2024 theme of the exhibition, In the Presence of Absence, I recognised the path of my research. I asked him: ‘Let me smell the desert’. He rightly replied: ‘Do you have any idea of the scale of dimensions we are talking about? But if you can, that’s fine with me’. After ten days I was in Saudi Arabia conducting the first survey.
So I ask the same question again: what scale are we talking about?
The total working area was about 462 square metres. When I was there, I found it really challenging, because controlling the smell in the open air is even more difficult.
Recreating the smell of the incense route was not difficult, even though I conducted 11,000 tests in Brazil. The trickiest part was making the smell the protagonist and making the huge structure that was used for burning it ‘disappear’. I used sand dunes to make it blend uniformly with the landscape.
So the source of the smell was a single point….
Yes, the sand dune with the golden roof of the structure. All the tests in Brazil worked and I was very convinced that everything would be okay. Actually, when I got there to conduct the initial tests, they didn’t work right away due to a lot of wind.
Then I realised that I didn’t have to fight nature, but rather work with nature: I studied the wind directions and they became the real ambassadors of the work, carrying the smell of incense throughout the desert. People wondered where that smell came from, followed it and arrived at the source.
Was there also a sense of the sacred in this incense ascending to the sky?
To the burning of aromas such as incense we owe the word pro-fumo, which means ‘through smoke’ precisely because in all cultures it has been used to communicate with deities, prepare medicines…and even for personal fragrance! In Arabia, it is still used for these purposes, with special tools employed to use incense smoke even to perfume the hair.
How was the impact with the Alula desert?
I found an almost mystical energy, a confrontation with nature that cannot be described in words and that really concerns the theme of presence and absence.
So after this experience, did your concept of the desert change? In what sense?
Yes, it has changed. In Brazil we don’t have desert, just some arid areas. I was convinced that in the desert was devoid of nature, in the sense of living beings. But instead there are animals, just like a forest: I could see their footprints in the sand every morning when I went back to check the work. And then there is this idea of immensity, of exposure to the infinite and to life, which I cannot put into words but which is magical, as is seeing the sunset, the sunrise, their sounds.
The desert is not empty. It is vast, but it is not empty, I would say it is full of many things. I like to run and I have also run in the desert: as long as I was in the Desert X area, which is full of people, I did not see any animals. But when I moved away, I happened to cross a pack of wild dogs and I immediately started walking backwards, slowly, until I reached other people, because it can be really dangerous.
Do you remember anything about the desert at night?
At night, the work was extinguished, yet the lingering scent of incense continued to attract animals. I am grateful for the extensive research I conducted to ensure the incense was as natural as possible, thereby preventing any harm to the animals or the enviroment. The entire Desert X project is meticulously planned with a strong emphasis on respecting and preserving nature.
Do you use special technologies in your work?
For Sfumato I only used natural raw materials, but in other works to synthetically reproduce odours I use Headspace technology, which makes a kind of “olfactory photograph” of a flower or an object. Basically, it is a kind of glass bell that manages to ‘capture’ the molecular composition of the odour of the object that is placed inside, so that the laboratory can reproduce it.
What are you working on now?
My next solo exhibition, in São Paulo, titled Inalaçao, was initially inspired by the incense route but has espanded to explore the broader concept of the scent journey, from inhalation to the complex reactions that aromas trigger in the human body.
I work a lot with ceramics and I thought of creating an olfactory path by inserting raw resins in the cracks of the materials, as if they were the vanishing lines. In the West we are used to the incense stick, but in the East they use resins placed to burn on a charcoal.
These resins that I brought from Arabia will be the guide for these ‘maps’ that I am recreating with different materials, all to be smelled: cinnamon, spices, you have to go ‘by nose’ and trust your instinct. Are we still capable? This is the challenge.
