AN.ARCHIVE.FRAME
Olfactory Foms

This project works at close range, where scent is used not as representation but as interference. Absolutes and raw materials are treated and combined as active matter designed to destabilize perception rather than evoke it. They do not aim for coherence or harmony. Instead, they generate perceptual misalignment, where familiar olfactory cues are slightly corrupted, displaced, or contradicted. What emerges is not memory in a direct sense, but distorted reconstructions: partial images, unstable associations, sensory distortions that interrupt recognition rather than complete it.

The work interferes with the brain’s attempt to stabilize perception, keeping meaning in a constant state of change. It creates subtle mismatches that prevent perception from settling, so nothing fully becomes clear or fixed, and meaning stays fragile, always forming but never completed. Olfaction becomes a medium for disruption. Instead of retrieving memory, it interferes with it, producing hybrid states where perception and recollection collapse into ambiguous formations.

This is not perfumery, and not evocation. It is olfactory personal experimentation based on destabilization, where oil blends function as mechanisms for disrupting memory and generating perceptual artifacts. It becomes a medium to explore the darker regions of cognition and memory through a controlled anti-format engagement with perception.


The Blends:
 
AN 1/ Liminal


The Blend seeks to function as a fracture. The compositions destabilise the past. Each olfactory structure operates as a false recollection, familiar yet misaligned, triggering a cognitive process that won’t resolve. What emerges is interference. Memory becomes unstable material, never fully formed and never fully held. It surfaces and dissolves before it can settle. The mind attempts reconstruction, yet each attempt fails, shifting experience between intimacy and disorientation. 

A disrupted architecture of recall, exposing the impossibility of correct remembering. This condition defines The Blend/Absolute, where olfactory matter functions as a field. Perception is no longer governed by optical logic but by a Post Optical and Post Photographic Condition, in which sensory traces circulate as unstable agents.

Within this framework, smell becomes a primary structure of perception, an autonomous system of distortion, residue, and temporal collapse. This logic aligns with perceptual inference in neuroscience, where perception is actively constructed through probabilistic interpretation of incomplete sensory input. Reality is never accessed directly, but continuously inferred and corrected. From this perspective, The Blend operates at the level where perception itself is formed, inhabiting the gap between sensation and inference, where recognition fails and, perception remains in continuous reconstruction.

The Frame within AN 1/ Liminal, the frame defines the material condition through which the blend is accessed. It acts as a porous interface rather than a boundary, mediating between absorption and release. Irish bog wood is selected for its intrinsic porosity and embedded temporality. Formed in peat over long periods, it retains traces of organic decomposition while remaining structurally intact. 

It functions as both a reservoir and a filter, subtly altering diffusion. Small fragments of Irish bog wood are selected as the medium for the blend, each defined by a singular identity of form and porosity. No piece is uniform; each structure modulates absorption, retention, and release. The result is a distributed system of reservoirs, where diffusion remains unstable and never fully resolved.

Its dark tonality and earth-bound scent merge with the composition, slowing its emergence and grounding it in material memory. The fragrance does not project outward but surfaces gradually, as if retrieved from within the substrate itself.

Ingredients
100% pure essential oils, in their unmodified natural state

1. ABSINTHE
2. LIME
3. LIQUID LEATHER
4. PATCHOULI
5. LABDANUM
6. CASTOREUM