This body of multimedia work, created as the emerged from a global pandemic, as a collaboration with the Institute of Art and Olfaction to explore the role of scent in the alchemic responses to death and disease. Dyspnea (ˈdis(p)-nē-ə) literally translating to bad, unfortunate breeze, is a medical term for shortness of breath and one of the common symptoms of Covid 19.
Dyspnea examines the collective human experience of living through a plague when even the act of breathing becomes a source of fear and anxiety. As the air between friends and family became poisonous, not just through the passage of disease, but due to beliefs and politics, Sarana looks at the ways in which humans turn to protection or assault when faced with an unprecedented medical event.
Interweaving long standing research into historic and extant systems of language, technology, medicine and belief, this work explored how scent can be a trauma trigger and a spiritual cleanser in times of fear. Smell, more than any other sense, has the ability to erase time and space. As a “high risk” disabled person who has undergone multiple cardiac interventions the ubiquitous smell of isopropyl alcohol, particularly at the start of the pandemic, triggered traumatic PTSD responses to previous medical events. However, for the first time personal trauma meshed with the collective as even able bodied, healthy people feared inhalation and death. To capture some of this anxiety’s surrounding smell this collaboration lead to the creation of a novel scent for this show called Dyspnea. In addition, the show consisted of a series of drawings, sculptural votives and relics that draw on contemporary symbolism, ancient myths and rituals of both the Eastern and Western cultures of my ancestry.
Like in times past, Dyspnea suggests that in spite of our monumental medical and scientific advancements, the unease of disease still pulls at the threads of civilization.
