OLFACTORY is a reflection on the imagination and on the loss of experience in general and in particular on one of the senses that together with taste is particularly difficult to describe: smell, or rather the sense of smell.
The work is composed of two principal elements: on the left a monitor, to the right a triangular prism whose surfaces are mirrors, with the word OLFACTORY inscribed on each of its sides.
Once the work has been set in motion by means of a sensor beneath the prism, we see on the monitor screen a woman whose profile recalls a Nordic virgin (the model is Danish) smelling different flowers at intervals of ten, twenty seconds. Each time she breathes in we hear her respiration and simultaneously the mirror-covered triangular prism on whose surfaces the word OLFACTORY is inscribed starts to turn. After about 15 minutes, if no one moves or approaches the apparatus, the mechanism switches off completely.
The action of smelling, of the olfaction, is triggered twice. Once by the image of the woman taking the flower and lifting it to her nose (visual level), and a second time at the moment that the prism start to turn, reflecting and putting the surrounding reality in ‘contact’ with the word OLFACTORY (conceptual level).
The imagination tends to construct a possible or lived reality; the mirror to reflects a reality that exists but is imperceptible by means of experience (it is possible to reflect a woderful, delicious paella but without being able to savour its flavour, its textures and its smell).
The alteration of the senses, the loss of an experience, the artificiality of smells, the construction of an increasingly alien and virtual world are phenomena that, as And see it, can be associated with this work. So, too, is the desire of wanting to recover something natural and essential to which, for some reason, we arer no longer in touch with.

Berlin 10.10.2002
Constantino Cierv