The sacred sensorial dimension of scents

The sacred sensorial dimension of scents,  2025

Charcoal, heat, black and white copal, Guatemalan myrrh, bee wax.

​

Íntimo - La Nueva Fábrica, Antígua - Guatemala

​

Created during her residency at La Nueva Fábrica (Antigua, Guatemala), the work investigates copal as a living material, exploring its spiritual, political, and aesthetic dimensions. It departs from the understanding that colonization also took place in the realm of the senses, transforming scent, an ancestral language,  from a spiritual offering into a liturgical instrument of power.

 

Activated by the slow combustion of charcoal, natural incenses (white and black copal, Guatemalan myrrh), and aromatic bee wax, the installation transforms the space into a portal of memory, invocation, and presence. It proposes a ritual gesture of remembering with the body and resisting through the senses, creating a symbolic territory where olfactory meanings are contested, reconfigured, and reinscribed.