The images in the series Mummifications make me think of places that have been shut up for a long time, places where that smell of dust and a slightly sour damp mingle. They make me think, then, of that sinister notion of the ‘dark room’ to which threatened punishments consigned us when we were children: places without light, with no sound, lost in a void with no sense of touch, but at the same time breathing in a slightly smelly atmosphere, like little scraps of decomposing organic remains. I have always wondered what smell must have greeted the robbers who profaned the mortuary chambers of the Pharaohs. Joan Fontcuberta ***************************************** Garden of the Mummies is a series of photographs taken in Canada and published by the Galerie Adriana Schmidt. The mummies are in fact trees wrapped up to withstand the Canadian winter. If you look closely at the photographs in this series you can ‘smell’ the scent of the forest, the gaze —the eye— leading you to smell nature as something omnipresent in these photographs. It is a visual smell. It is Fontcuberta’s genius that determines our feelings by way of our imagination. Adriana Schmidt