What does an activist speech smell like? What aromas come to mind when we hear certain words? The senses connect us to the world through deep ties and, among them, smell is par excellence the one that has the ability to evoke the most vivid memories, ahead of sight, taste or touch.
The Ideograma Foundation opens the exhibition “Resistance and Essence” that is part of the LOOP Barcelona “City Screen” program, framed within its project on ARTivism.
The exhibition is based on the videos of two iconic activist speeches, one from the 20th century and the other from the current one. On the one hand, Martin Luther King left his mythical phrase “I have a dream” engraved on our memory. That speech delivered on August 28, 1963 in front of a crowd, fought for the peaceful coexistence between whites and blacks, at the same time that it became a hymn to hope for social change. On the other hand, the young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, with her forceful way of speaking, shook the world in 2019 with a speech at the Davos forum, warning about the future and unbridled climate change. Both speeches are pregnant with the illusion of social and political transformation, strength and decision.
However, the words of both evoke very different temporal and aromatic landscapes. The artistic intervention that will be presented at the Ideograma Foundation, investigates this universe and the possibility of creating a poetics of the senses, through two videos that record these discourses and their transmodal interpretation. Transmodality is a way of exploring cognitive / creative processes, which studies experimental science and which has been applied to other contexts such as, for example, the one carried out by Charles Spence in the field of gastronomy. Transmodality allows us to describe perceptual phenomena related to synesthesia, that faculty that allows us to hear colors or smell sounds.
The amount of information we receive through the stimuli generated by the senses (auditory, olfactory, tactile, etc.) is multimodal, however we normally privilege one of them (sight or hearing), relegating part of the simultaneous information available . In this exhibition, viewers are invited to explore the discourses of Martin Luther King and Greta Thunberg, from an open perceptual universe, using aromatic devices that will allow the perception and analysis of discourses in multiple sensory dimensions.