[French PARFUM, from Italian PARFUMARE, lat.per → through, lat. fumus → smoke, meaning “to smoke through”]

Perfume is a mixture of fragrant essential oils and aroma compounds, fixatives, and solvents used to give the human body, objects, and living spaces a pleasant smell. The amount and type of solvent mix with the fragrance oil dictate whether a perfume is considered a perfume extract, Eau de Perfume, Eau de toilette, or Eau de Cologne.

I'm transforming the gallery space into a laboratory where using the lab equipment, I'll produce perfumes from human excretions. Visitors can ‘leave’ any of their excretions and the perfume will be made from them. They receive one specimen, while the other is retained in my perfume repository.

The time it takes to produce a perfume is approximately 60 minutes. The flask filling takes place in the gallery. The perfume is named after the donor and the type of excretion it was made from. The product can be used.

notes:

• gallery as laboratory – ‘art’ becomes functional, both approachable and unapproachable – because art might smell badly
• sweat, sperm, urine, feces, menstrual blood, milk – as the basis for perfume derivation, a transformation of excretions into something else in an unnatural way
• perfume as social and cultural value- invisibility and strange sensuality, a potent substance
• flux – the importance of flow (→ Deleuze)- subjective impression of smell (we like our smell no matter how it smells)

H. Miller

I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gall-stones, its gravel, and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence, the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution.