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An immersive sound and scent performance in collaboration with Doreen Ooi.
In a letter format, recipients received a QR code directing to an immersive soundscape composed by Doreen Ooi and an accompanying bespoke paper incense made by Arianna Petrich.
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Fire is a language. It whispers, come alive. The flame is the catalyst that activates and brings the substance to life. Perhaps a resin, a wood, a leaf. In its combustion, its disappearance, it tells you the purest story about its life, its origin, the plant it came from. To me, incense is the soul of a tree.
It is transportive in a way no other object or substance is to me. It is the act of lighting something on fire, transforming it from solid to smoke to nothingness. In the process of its destruction, the vanishing of its physical form, another world appears. Maybe, it brings me to a solemn and dark room in a Kyoto machiya 300 years ago. Or to a basilica in Florence. Or to a puja in a temple in Kerala, alongside a profusion of marigolds and rose petals and ghee and coconuts. Especially in this moment of our narrowed orbits, my mind receives these evocations even more gratefully. Incense is a personal experience that connects me with everything outside of myself.
…I wonder what incense can teach us. In many spiritual traditions, this smoke is seen as a thread connecting the physical and spiritual realms. In surrendering its physical form, it reaches its fullest expression. Maybe the lesson is something about letting go. I think of the most famous piece of aloeswood, named Ranjatai, which has been protected and occasionally exhibited at the Shōsōin since it was given to Emperor Shōmu of Japan over 1200 years ago. What does it mean for something to be beheld by so many but experienced by so few? To experience it in its fullest expression would also mean its destruction. What are we able to take in about an object that is best appreciated by one sense if we apprehend it with the wrong sense? Seeing something that’s meant to be smelled. I once knew a person who licked a Frank Stella painting. I wonder what it told him. What could smelling an opera tell us?
-Arianna Petrich, 2021