To purchase and find out more, visit agar’s dedicated website.
Year 1999: the y2k bug looms in every computational system in the world. As midnight strikes, entropy cascades every hour as time zones catch up to the disastrous inability to process the new millennium. Computers overheat in confusion and hot wires melt their protective encasing in heated protest. The path of technology is forever altered.
cereale
Year 2030: wheat, rye, and bran monocultures are threatened globally by an unknown infection event. speculators inflate the price of all remaining glutinous products and shoppers amass them in bulk, not knowing what comes next. Food scientists create a scent to appease the taste for bread that threatens to remain unfulfilled in this ecocide: cereale. *created in collaboration with Isabel Lee
bitbit
Year 2021: you live in an urban center, forced to quarantine at your apartment in a high rise. the only verdancy you’re interacting with is on a screen or in the form of a bland lettuce mix that gets delivered to you every tuesday. You miss the darkness of plants, their complex dampness and astringency. bitbit fulfills that for you with the power of complex, bitter plants.
matsutake musk
Year 2077: humans have begun incorporating mycelium into their routines, diets, architectural structures, and medicinal systems in exponential ways. The increasingly abundant quantity of fungi in human bodies begins to create a communal bodily emanation uncannily similar to mushrooms. In the warm crevice of an armpit, you find a fruiting body.
damp
Year 3030: human extinction has allowed flora to propagate wildly, bursting through concrete and rigid architectural structures. The skin of the earth has restored itself to a microbially-dense state. damp gives you a taste of this future; it’s a gentle whisper of a musty room in the middle of a forest, the breath of the earth as wet soil in soli-molecule form.
Bilingual edition (English, Spanish) produced as part of olfactory research work with Ensayos. Funded by NYFA + Anonymous Was a Woman in 2024.
turberas olorosas, odorant peatlands is a scent edition representing four wetlands and peatlands with diverse ecological and social conditions. The project works towards expanded understandings of the life-force of peatlands and their urgent ecological conservation. It also exists as an archive and continuation of Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol: Smell the Peatlands.
The four territories represented in the edition are:
Karokynká, Tierra del Fuego ● Taaspen
Bog Hollow, New York ● Rich
Bogerudmyra, Oslo ● Wolves in the Mire
Minjerribah, Quandamooka Country ● Jalo Gaba
Accompanied by commissioned texts from Hsuan L. Hsu, Kashina, Camila Marambio, and agustine zegers. Fragrances produced by agustine zegers and Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel in deep collaboration and consultation with the Turba Tol Hol-Hol team. Read the insert in English and Spanish.
Collective olfactory map and limited fragrance edition. Produced through Doing Language: Word Work. Commissioned by ICA:VCU, curated by Nontsikelelo Mutiti and Egbert Vongmalaithong in 2022
This project responds to the routine olfactory erasue that occurs as part of the choreographies of cleanliness that art institutions conduct towards sterilization and conservation. It sought to excavate the hidden smells of ICA:VCU by conducting a collective counter-cartography of smell, surveying and investigating the exant odors of the institution. This resulted in an archive of findings as well as a limited fragrance edition gathering some of those invisibilized odors.
The workshop counter-cartographies of smell accompanied the installation of the museum edition. This was an ambulatory scent demonstration and an exercise in smell cartography, allowing visitors to experience the ICA from an odorant perspective by visiting key odorant stopping points throughout it.