18Libro_Sinestesia_completo-final

the loved one is heightened precisely by their absence. Solutions with which
Renaissance aesthetics laid the foundations of the Baroque: since it is love
that moves reality, we should ‘marry’ the arts: music and poetry, drawing and
poetics, etc.
When I proposed to take the mascletà firecracker extravaganza as a narrative
model for drawing up a balance, autobiography, review of the things I had been
doing in the world, artistic operations, experiences and so on, I knew I would
have to add all sorts of documentary information: texts, photographs, sounds,
videos, etc. The direct experience was missing.
I have seen the mascletàs broadcast on television, heard them commented on the
radio and in real time on the Internet, but these representations all lacked the sense
of smell, an intense stench of gunpowder.
At times the memory of the ear-splitting noise of the mascletàs brings the
smell of gunpowder back to me.
Just as courtly love was sublimated as ‘smell’ in Cavalcanti’s poetry, those
Baroque marriages renewed it by summing energies: in the long romance
there appeared, for a moment, enjambed among the infinite sum of verses, the
memory and smell of the loved one. Even as a caricature: the stink of love.
A synaesthesia caused by the vertigo of the senses, by the merciless sum of
musical rhymes, the alliteration, the word play, the punning of the concepts.
Synaesthesia seems to be the explanation that critics and scientists give for that
rapture of smell experienced by the reader’s body, pragmatic datum of the
triumph of the poem.
In its modest way, this was how the representation that I outlined was meant
to work; the accumulation of images, quotations, data, photographs, signs,
videos, cassettes, sounds, texts, colours, forms, ideas, associations, games and so
on would suddenly unleash the smell of gunpowder, the aroma of childhood.
That was the idea, to propose a room, a laboratory in which the spectators
would be imbued, would get to know and, carried away by that knowledge,
be infused with a smell —of their life, of their world— evoked by the way
fragments of a biography, studies of the works of art, readings of life were
associated in the pieces. The gunpowder smell of childhood.
EQUIPO 57
‘The geometry of the form doesn’t smell. What has a smell is the material that
describes it, the plaster, at once humble and noble.’
—Juan Cuenca, Juan Serrano
Mark Francis
For me, Laminin represents a field of sound and smell. It presents itself in waves
of pulsating vibration and with these gives off a strong aroma. Its echoes and
fragrances are strong, tenuous, and also rhythmic. Its chaos is its order; its chaos
is its aroma.
BIANCA BECK
baby
birth burning
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