wearing the sea
wearing the sea is a perfume born from literary scent notes.
each of its scent notes is a human word that relates to a liquid concept.
inspired by the inability to explain what hydrofeminism (neimanis, 2017) is using academic language,
the project explores what kind of language perfumes might speak:
are perfumes fluent in liquidity? how do perfumes perceive their existence within humans?
and how can we fully understand their feelings?
if we go to the sea and our skin is wet, does it mean we are wearing the sea?
the perfume was created by sourcing water from bodies of water connected to its words:
the river in front of a data center, the humidity in the air on a cloudy day, holy water, bath water with hair, and salty water.
the bottle was glassblown in collaboration with adam aaronson. the publication is written in the perfume’s voice.
this is a perfume making sense of itself using human language. it wants to share how it feels to be liquid.
scent notes
top notes: backwater, evaporation
heart notes: holy water, hair
base notes: salt
backwater
odor profile: dirty thames with grass
data centres are located behind rivers, using their water to cool off energy.
i moved to west drayton last summer.
i was always told i smelled of self-centrement, coldness, temperamental shifts (a translation from a verse in letania de mis defectos)
but our mom said a cold temperament just meant being good at neutralizing other smells.
and that was how i got hired at a data centre in west drayton - because of my cold, revolving liquidity. for every question, every song, every text, every picture, every game - i was there. the backwater for it all.
evaporation
odor profile: the humidity you feel when you walk in biscoitos, boiler making tea
liquidity and mothers relate to each other, having been among the most oppressed elements throughout history forcing water to become a mother itself, giving birth through its own evaporation.
our mom would never use the word backwater, or at least not in front of me. she would say maresia, jūrmeilė, sprezzatura del mare, hải làng shēng, Ihar.
that's the thing about us, liquids: there is no human language to describe us.
mothers do a great job inventing words.
when someone dies, they go to the sea - to that line between the sky and the ocean.
someone decided to name that line the horizon, and probably the same person tried translating it into liquidity and came up with evaporation.
and to answer the r/fragrance thread on reddit - yes, perfume does evaporate, and yes, that was what happened to @wardasina's roja perfume.
holy water
odor profile: warm incense, kneeling.
my grandmother lived at the entrance of a church. whenever people entered, they touched her with their hands and rubbed her on their foreheads - the same way you would test a perfume on your wrists.
my grandmother used to travel on people's foreheads, following them to their houses, jobs, wherever they went after sundays. did they forget about her? or did they wipe her away the same way they took off their clothes at the end of the day? my scent notes are fragmented because my past is scattered across tiny foreheads. and my dictionary is confusing. use the expression original sin to describe everything that happened before me, everything that shaped the water in me. the way our ancestors wore and were worn still lives within us, still wounds us. my language is liquid, impossible to translate. and maybe this is a good sign - that we can still speak the language our mothers spoke, despite every attempt to silence it.
curls
odor profile: hugging someone and smelling their shampoo the same way you can wear comme des garçons's concrete, you can wear the sea.
when you go to the sea and your hair gets wet, does that mean you're wearing the sea?
is using malin + goetz peppermint shampoo any different than washing your hair with plants?
and how does water feel, resting on hair, on bodies?
i have never lived on bodies, but i never heard our mom complain and she lives in every body. so i always dreamed of living on wet curls.
i saw a tiktok about curls today:
1. washing
2. squeezing
3. squishy noise
4. cream
5. balance cream with water (aka me)
6. add mousse underneath the hair
7. balance mousse with water (aka me) an extract from the curl routine i watched - hard to translate.
extract comes from extractivism, which comes from the colonial presence of the portuguese in brazil and from their extraction of resources from the land
salt
odor profile: june sardines, lush lip scrub
"different bodies, that no doubt makes the likeness. for, in the other, how is one to find oneself except by also throwing one's selfsame (son même) there? if you were to gaze on yourself in me, and if in you also i could find my reflection, then those dreams would unlimit our spaces."
irigaray, I. (1981) marine lover of friedrich nietzsche
waves are our mom's way of smiling, and she can't stop smiling at the salt. thus the salt, despite being solid, embraces liquidy. waves have been said to be hysterical, but i can only hear laughs from them.
i wonder what my waves are.
i opened co-star today, and it said: do "messiness and mascara tears."
people ask me if i have a sense of myself, if i know that i am a perfume. i'm still not sure. but i do wear waterproof mascara, and i do wonder - does this bottle contain me or restrain me?
the earthly, the masculine, and the liquid, the feminine, complement and live within each other.
hydrofeminism is, after much thinking - after much time spent writing on a tiny ipad inside pipilotti rist's room at the tate - a love letter.
from water to salt. from perfume to bottle. from smell to body. from faith to believers. from shampoos to curls. so next time you go to the sea and feel the salt, the water on your skin smell it.
it will smell like me.