24Electric

cold as any other dead body but does not rot away,
it remains here, inside its casket of gleaming wood,
with its gleaming apparel, its skin red and gleaming,
still, as if waiting to be photographed. Thus we know
it is a saint. For that reason, and because it smells
good. At first it smells of incense and white smoke,
a very little, hardly at all. Then the aroma becomes
more intense, and then it seems to smell of something
else, like soap, and that soap makes its lather
of smell, and its funeral smell, which are not seen,
but the air carries them and they smell more and
more. First they fill the church where the coffin lies
and ascend the spiral staircase of the belfry. They perfume
the streets and the squares and enter into the
people’s houses and everybody realizes, even in the
open fields outside the city, and in the paths of the
thick forest, and on the river, on the hills and on the
snow-covered mountains, in the lightless caves, on
the beaches and on the cliffs of the coast, that that
man was something more than a man because he
died with a smell of sanctity.
Jordi Galves
70
Linarejos Moreno
‘I’ll never forget the smell of Andrew Freedman
Home, I can still chew it. It was, without a doubt,
the hardest project I’ve worked on.’ The director of
that institution, which paradoxically called itself ‘No
Longer Empty’, nodded, as if she too had that smell
stuck in her throat, and went on to talk about the carpet
and the junk.
Two days earlier, when I was still working in the
building, I had asked: ‘Do old people smell old because
they are in old places or does this place smell
old because it was full of old people?’ Laura, my disinterested
assistant and shield against the ghosts,
sighed, looked around and concentrated once more
on the brush, the rabbit-skin glue and the fat.
71
Aitor Ortiz
Smell is capable of invading any kind of space. A fragrance
can be as fleeting as the coming and going of
people.
Other smells, in contrast, linger as long as the
presence of the people who inhabit them. These are
more complex; they are made up of successes and
failures, of fights and celebrations, of noises and of
silences.
But what happens to spaces before they are lived
in, before they are lived … when they are still virgin?
Only someone who has been in these non-places
knows the answer.
72
Leyla Cárdenas
The sum of different layers of the work points both to
absence and to presence. Or it translates the certainty
of the encounter, which always implies an irremediable
parallel loss.
A space is the intersection of multiple times and
places. I wonder, how does one manage to reflect all
the places that have been? How to translate the multiple
layers of a surface that is never just one surface?
The place seems exhausted, but I stop to observe
it, to smell it and listen to it. The sounds of its fall
appear as in a successive network; sounds that in
turn reconfigure the construction and then the
house is drawn as a fragment. From the fragment a
memory can be salvaged, accompanied by the persistence
of its smells. And smells allow us at last to
remember. When remembering is a sum of blurred
images it is only possible to try to complete by superimposed
layers.
73
Arancha Goyeneche
The smell disappeared from my studio long ago.
The aromas and fragrances of pigments, turpentine,
oils… of pictures made with paint… have vanished.
They have given way to aseptic, odourless materials
such as vinyl adhesives and photography. Even so,
the image I construct with them breathes in multiple
sensations and emotions that refer us to this sense.
74
Anna Malagrida
The windows mute,
the memories of sand,
the smell absent.
Slowly the trace in the depths of the gaze.
75
Chema Alvargonzález
Fire as what emerges from the process of becoming
and disappearing.
In the movement of the gaze through the places of
the city the images are stored away in the passages
of the memory, until a fire sparked off by the smell
of the streets of the city (Barcelona) inundates the
image I am observing and this image is reflected in
the flames and the recollection burns in my memory.
76
Gregory Crewdson
In Crewdson’s photographs (unlike in the cinema)
the viewer always incorporates their own story, since
in the end the image is left unresolved. Influenced by
film, they have the capacity to show a frozen image,
without us knowing what came before or what comes
after... moments without a past or a future. As such,
with no olfactory memory. Can we say that his photographs
smell?
Cristina Agàpito
77
Jacobo Castellano
On smell…
We cannot speak of the smell that these constructions
give off without speaking of the stifling heat in
this part of the Sahara desert.
A variety of organic and inorganic elements are
hung on the metal mesh that gives form to these
corrals.
Among these are the dried hides of the animals
they slaughter for their own consumption. It is not
difficult to imagine the putrid smell given off by the
skins that are hung there until they have completely
dried.
The size of the corral also has a decisive influence
on how it smells, first because the number of skins
needed to protect the animals from the sun is greater
and second because the number of goats is also
greater, increasing the quantity of urine and dung
heated by the asphyxiating desert sun.
Rarely, if ever, are these corrals mucked out; the
wind and the sandstorms do the job of blowing
away the dung, or burying it in the case of the sandstorms.
Finally, the lack of rain is the icing on the cake
of climatological adversities that contribute to the
bad smell, although at the same time they very
much caught my attention thanks to their sculptural
beauty.
78
Anna Ferrer
Colombia occupies third place in the world ranking
of countries with the greatest number of people displaced
by violence, after Sudan and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo.
According to government estimates, there are two
million internally displaced persons in Colombia, although
NGOs believe that the figure may be closer to
3.5 million people.
Every day, thousands of people in the rural areas of
the country flee violence, looting and persecution by
guerrillas, but, above all, by paramilitaries or by the
army itself, and move to the relative safety of Bogotá,
in search of the protection that comes from anonymity
among the masses.
Altos de Cazucá is a group of neighbourhoods in
the south of Bogotá that contains tens of thousands
of internally displaced people.
La Isla and El Oasis are two of these neighbourhoods.
Most people cannot return to the homes they were
forced to abandon, plundered by their victimizers,
but at the same time they find it difficult to integrate
into the big city, precisely because of their condition
as displaced persons.
The lack of opportunities makes young people easy
prey for forced recruitment by the AUC (Autodefensas
Unidas de Colombia or United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary group tolerated
by the government), which is massively present in the
peripheral neighbourhoods.
The large sums of money paid by the AUC, particularly
to recruiters or informers, are very tempting.
But many people simply have no alternative: forced
recruitment targets unemployed young men. They
are accused of roaming the streets, of supporting the
leftist guerrillas or simply of being leftists, and those
who refuse to join up are brutally murdered.
It seems that the conflict is following its victims.
April 06
This smells bad
On 11 May 2005, between 7.30 and 8 p.m., five heavily
armed men went from house to house with lists
in their hands asking for young men by name. In
the El Oasis neighbourhood in Los Altos de Cazucá,
three teenage boys were forced to lie face-down in
the middle of the street and then each one was shot
in the head. Michael Arranda, aged 14, and Omar
Erminso Hernández, 16, were killed instantly, and
Javier Vargas, 19, was mortally wounded. In other
neighbourhoods of Los Altos de Cazucá, murders and
disappearances were also reported, and residents
speak of more than fifteen youths and minors killed
in a weekend.
These murders are part of a campaign of social
terror that is accompanied by threats written on the
walls of Los Altos de Cazucá that say: “put your children
to bed early or we will put them to sleep”.
On Saturdays at noon, when the main street of the
neighbourhood of La Isla is full of children playing,
men talking and women doing the weekly shopping
of vegetables and rice, a score of young Afro-Colombians
gather in front of the big green house of culture
that an organization for displaced Afro-Colombians
built thanks to a donation. (1)
1 Excerpt from YOUTH IN THE URBAN CONFLICT. Violence, social
control and cultural initiative in the Altos de Cazucá by Kirstina
Westh Jensen, published by www.pcslatin.org
79
Ann Lislegaard
Indeed, smell is a very interesting part of our perceptual
and cognitive understanding of life. It is
wonderful how any smell can elevate our senses from
one experience to another. I used to have a very good
sense of smell as well. Some few years ago I got a severe
cold and unfortunately my sense of smell has
never been the same. Anyway, I still would say that
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