gegen smell

Close your eyes. 
Breathe in.

What do you smell?

Of all the senses, smell may be the most fleeting. It can be hazy and volatile, like a gust of wind, and yet still haunt us for a lifetime. Whether it is the freshly mown grass from a childhood memory or the dank miasma of a public toilet you used to cruise, a smell can spark unexpected remembrances or dramatic changes in mood.

Smell can be comforting or repugnant, or both at the same time. Like projections on a smoke screen, our opinions about smell are flavored by the normative binaries in which they are situated. We are told that "men should smell like men," in a showcase of strength and masculinity, unyielding as wood – just as we are told that "women should smell nice," docile and sweet, like a fragile flower to be protected. Further, we are taught that everyone should be bathed and squeaky clean, with any bodily odor seen as a beastly betrayal to the "progress of human civilization."

And yet, at times, you may find yourself engulfed in an odoriferous here and now. Perhaps when buried in someone's armpit, soothed by stinging notes of grapefruit and cumin. Or when wandering downwards and presented with the tang of civet and piss. Maybe you get dizzy at the sensation of your lover's smegma caressing your nose and tongue while discovering their secrets and secretions...

Let go of your shame and fears! 
Add a new olfactory dimension to the exaltation of your self-expression. 
Choose your aroma and let loose your pores!

Intoxicated by this appreciation of bodily musks, we may be tempted to only valorize the sweaty "essential" oil of our human embodiment and deem any additional fragrance as an artificiality to be distilled away like a social mask. But considered as things in themselves, neither a vial of rose oil nor a dirty ass crack smells like anything at all if no one is around to sniff them. If an experience of the same odorant may feel different to organisms with different olfactory receptors, what is smell then but a mummer's play of the mind, a theatrical enactment on the stage of our consciousness?

Let's be our own playwrights, our own first-person authors in this fictional world of perfumes and stinks! 
Let's write this story together, mutually recognizing each other by our self-chosen odors and olfactory kinks!

GEGEN invites you to think – and smell – for yourself.

concept courtesy of AnAIs NN & Charlotte Zero
photo courtesy of Florian Hetz
graphics & logo by Enrico Bardin

video teaser by Hanna Schaich
w/ Luca della Corte