agustine zegers
work        

Breathing is touching at the mucosal lining. Every act of smell is inmost, allowing of power’s touch. Not just at its apex but in the real intimacy of the unseen. It is fed and inhaled. It lives in alveoli, with our cells, connecting us inextricably. Power is a discreet and penetrating breath: constant, inseparable, and blended with our bodily functions.

“Plenitude. I am overwhelmed by meaning. Every time I breathe, the rhythm is natural, fluid. It fuses action. I became aware of my ‘cosmic lung.’ I enter into the total rhythm of the world. The world is my lung.” (Lygia Clark, The Abandonment of Modern Art)

A toxin threatens, but it also beckonsby-products of fossil fuels are fragmented and recontextualized through visual and olfactory means, revealing our porous embeddedness in the simultaneously noxious and playful realm of plastics. 

this installation is named after a line in Mel Y. Chen’s “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.”

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aire internoa study of the mediated breath of industrialized buildings: the machinic order is dissasembled by errant vapors that whisper back the historicity of extracted materials.

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(d)olor atemporalan olfactive collapse of ancient life and deep time is materialized through portals of petroleum extraction.

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corriente etérica
a olfactory somatic practice guides us from the pulsating currents of our bodies into the subsea cables that host our communications along the ocean floor, offering aqueous and plastified encounter along them.

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turba tol hol-hol tol
in co-creation with the Ensayos collective: a speculative dive into peatlands is channeled through the smellscapes of bog extractivism, sphagnum moss, beaver dams, and more. anchored in the bogs of karokynká, tierra del fuego; and bog hollow, new york.
     
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counter-cartographies of smell
a routinely deodorized art institution is mapped for its missing odors. the results are distilled into an olfactory edition with notes of licorice, plywood, hydraulic oil, vegetality, and clorox.

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+ workshop: counter-cartographies of smell


perfume terrenal, lenteja áuricaa performance agglutinates the mystic exaltations of anchorites with the networked spirituality of global protein exports. conducted in collaboration with soil molecules, synthesized protein dust, and Mother Julian.


preparing to welcome the chthulucenea speculative lifestyle spell is designed to invite communion with agential materialities and life forms, designed as an accompaniment to Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble.

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filthglycerin
an instructional piece questions the deployment of european hygiene practices and their relationship to coloniality and commerce. as executed with: larvae, dog spit, human spit, dirt, multispecies hair, and more, across different geographies.

+ Fermenting Feminism
+ Fermenting Feminism book