Olfactory Worldmaking

This paper will argue that worldmaking—a concept that has been the focus of conversations in phenomenology, science fiction studies, critical ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and environmental humanities—offers a generative framework for understanding aesthetic experiments that center the sense of smell. The presentation will develop, through close analysis of literary texts and multimodal artworks, a set of theoretical concepts for understanding how smell can function as a capacity for making phenomenological and relational worlds, whether by reintegrating suppressed memories, sustaining “microclimates” supportive of precarious lives, or offering solicitations towards modes of intimacy and kinship that hold the promise of generating alternate futures. Among the questions explored will be: How might our methods for studying and making olfactory works shift if we started from the conviction that we don’t fully know what smelling is, what it can be, and what it might enable? what are the distinctive affordances of smell as a medium of worldmaking, especially for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) whose sensory experiences and values have been marginalized from modernity’s climate-controlled, deodorized, and artificially scented spaces? How do speculative narratives and artworks that unsettle or reorder sensorial experience hold space for nonvisual and “illiberal” (following Kandice Chuh) modes of relationality?

Keywords: smell, speculation, worldmaking, critical race studies, more-than-human 

Jenni Lauwrens (School of the Arts, University of Pretoria, South Africa)

Haptic Worlding: Touching Art, Touching Lives - Forging Bridges Through Art

In this presentation I will describe and reflect on an educational project that is positioned in the intersecting fields of visual studies, disability studies and community engagement. I will present the findings of interviews, reflections and recordings of a guided touch tour of sculptures that was held at the University of Pretoria, South Africa in 2024. The tour was designed by sighted students in Visual Studies for individuals with visual impairment. The format of the tour was based on literature describing different ways in which audio and touch tours might be structured and the successes and shortcomings of various approaches. It was also designed with the assistance of University of Pretoria students and staff with sight impairments. Although the intention of the project was to make artworks accessible to people who cannot see them, the data revealed that remarkable interactions arose between the students without visual disabilities and the audience with visual disabilities. Thus, touching art facilitated profound exchanges not only about the artworks that were presented, but more importantly, it enriched understanding of the lived experiences of persons with sight impairment.
Keywords: Touch tour, visual impairment, disability studies, community engagement

Rob Shields ∆ (University of Alberta, Canada)

A Political Ecology of Ethics

This paper considers the relation between sensory perception and experience that gives rise to aesthesis. It considers how, as sensory self-evidence, aesthesis is the basis for ethical judgements about situation and context. Such contexts may be environmental or political but in turn aesthesis relies on references to collective experience and the polis for a normalization of perception. Heraclitean and Protagorean aesthesis as fundamental relation has persisted and been recovered as e.g. experience in William James’s pragmatism. It is integral to perception in A.N. Whitehead’s work, and is the founding mutualism of Simone Weil’s philosophy of obligation. Contemporary thinkers as diverse as Berardi and Serres find aesthesis as a material contact that grounds reason and conjoins thought to reality. Aesthesis is thus the relation between the perceptible or real, and the collective, that is, the polis. On one hand, the polity involves an ethical relation, but for Weil in particular it entailed a political process that exceeded rights. The polis is also the organization of obligation, or of “what matters” as well as what and at what scales sense data are perceived as real, significant and relevant.
Keywords: aesthesis, ethics, politics, obligation, polis