ABSTRACT
Scent-rolling artfully challenges the otherwise arbitrary demarcation and separation of senses in that the engagement is both haptic and olfactory all at once. Smell both creates the landscape and yet is indecipherable from it, a source of anxiety for a property system obsessed with things and separation. The South American Quechua language, spoken largely in the Andes, has a sophisticated system of differentiation not only for smells but also for smelling actions and practices. The nature of smell, the unseen work, is an astonishing interrogation of intellectual property boundaries, of the nature of the work, and the intentionality of the author. Smell, the “lower sense,” has historically been regarded as animalistic and unrespectable, deployed to mark out difference in discriminatory classist and racist discourse as well as discourses of gender and sexuality. Marcel Duchamp also had played with expressions through smell a few years earlier in what is possibly one of the first examples of olfactory art.
