Sillage de la Reine, 2018

Nine French perfumes inspired by the perfume of Queen Marie Antoinette applied to solid resin granules, plaster, publicly available booklets and antique metal jewelry box lined with red satin.

​

Exhibition view at Museu de Arte Brasileira, São Paulo, Brazil

​​

​

Inspired by a legend surrounding Marie Antoinette’s attempted escape, Sillage de la Reine explores the mechanisms that fabricate authenticity, memory, and cultural value by transforming commercial fragrances into critical devices.

​

The installation brings together nine contemporary perfumes that claim to be the original formula worn by the queen, ranging from tourist souvenirs to luxury editions sold at Versailles. Each fragrance has been solidified into a sculpture, arranged as a French-style garden with ten thousand white plaster roses. At the center of the space, among the roses, lies a decapitated bust of the queen.

​

Visitors walk through this aromatic field, suspended between the sublime and the kitsch, between opulence and erasure. The fragrances, volatile and ephemeral, contrast with the rigidity of the forms, becoming metonymies of Marie Antoinette’s constant historical reinvention. The work does not seek to reconstruct an original perfume, but rather to question the logic that transforms the past into a sensory commodity.

​

By relocating these fragrances from the marketplace into the realm of art, Sillage de la Reine attempts to break with the logic of consumption and repositions scent as a critical language capable of destabilizing narratives about history, power, and memory

​

Collection MAB/FAAP Museu de Arte Brasileira

This work was created during the residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, supported by the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation.

​

​