The thing with power is what do you do with it. Competition and bullying are a part of Nature, and our nature. Sebastiano Mauri talks with Lorcan O’Neill and Julian Bedel
Sebastiano Mauri in conversation with Lorcan O’Neill and Julian Bedel
Sebastiano Mauri: Lorcan O’Neill and Julian Bedel appear on my computer screen in the midst of the hottest summer ever recorded. We have just witnessed droughts, tornados, storms, fires, floods and pest invasions. As I am writing, a third of Pakistan is flooded, leaving millions homeless, the ongoing drought in Afghanistan has rendered uninhabitable much of its land, and fires in the Amazon Forest have risen to levels never recorded before. We fall into the trap of thinking that we can’t do anything about it, as individuals or even as nations. As Alice Walker says: The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
We carry on business as usual, choosing collective suicide. The Global North is responsible for ninety percent of global emissions, but ninety percent of climate change related disasters afflict the Global South, which is paying for our bill. The level of urgency felt in the Global North is far weaker than in the Global South, and this furthers our deadly inertia. We prefer to protect our levels of consumerism rather than face any change that we perceive as menacing to our way of life. Even when it has been observed that for people all over the world, from Latin America, to India, to China and rural Europe, getting ahead economically and joining the urban consumerist society has not risen their levels of satisfaction. One is never happy for long about their new belonging. We don’t even manage the task of directing our spending power, the only one actually valued in this system, as not to feed the large corporations that are known to con tribute to the causes of climate change.
JB I started getting into perfumes when my father one day sent me this paper about a Nobel prize for medicine, it explained all the physiological changes that occur when we’re exposed to volatile molecules: they can alter our hormonal levels, perception of time, blood pressure or mood. This is a mostly untapped topic in the art world and I realized that they would be an interesting language to explore. We have always relied on plants for food, medicine, shelter, connecting with divinity and so on, making our relationship with their scents symbiotic. We do not need to access rationality to relate to a natural scent, our response is intuitive as our bond with plants is embedded in us. My first scent was an attempt to recreate the landscape of my land, rich of wild plants. I rented a space in Buenos Aires of fifteen square meters, designed a glass flask that allowed you to smell the scent in autonomy and created a fake perfume shop to present my creation. It became a real one.
Scents as part of artists work
SM In the Amazon they say people are the dream of plants. All animals descend from plants, which were the only life form on Earth for millions of years before the first swimming algae inaugurated what we now call the animal kingdom. Plants are our ancestors, their scents bring us back to times we weren’t even conceived yet. Lorcan, as a gallerist, have you ever worked with artists that use scent as part of their work?
LON At the end of the Eighties I did a performance piece with Leigh Bowery (who later achieved popularity through the portraits Lucien Freud painted of him). It was a week-long performance. We had divided the gallery in two using a one way mirror. Leigh was lit, but the audience was in the dark. They could see him, while he could only see his own reflection. It was a silent piece, the only thing he requested was for the gallery to have a strong smell every day.
We would leave dishes filled with cotton wool soaked in banana or mint flavor, or even gasoline or bleach. He wanted a smell to be absorbed as soon as you’d enter the gallery. Lucien Freud would come every day; that’s when he ended up asking Leigh to sit for him. The gasoline smell was not a popular one.
SM I’ve read in an interview that you consider perfumes to be a passive aggressive move towards others, so you decided not to wear any. It might have to do with what Julian was saying about volatile molecules being able to get a strong response out of people.
LON I feel similarly about music: it can be bothersome if it’s imposed on you and not of your taste. SM I’m often asking to lower the music in restaurants. Perfumes you are unknowingly exposed to, especially if strong and artificial, can be invasive.
Things haven’t changed even after Covid-19 lockdown
SM During the first lockdown, the art world stopped and had time to reflect on its practices. I was one of those people who believed things would be different once we’d start our engines again. It doesn’t look like that’s happened, does it?
LON It’s gotten worse. At least before everyone knew that they were on a ferris wheel that had been going on a long time, and it looked like it was going to continue, so, on an individual basis you could opt out for a while and know that everything would be pretty much the same once you’d return. In the last few months, every single person wants to have their biennale, their art fair, SM their festival, their opening, their concert, their anniversary party and so on. I have taken up a space in Venice. The city is jammed packed with tourists. Human beings don’t like staying
home thinking, and they’ve done enough of that during the pandemic. We shouldn’t move around so much, travel all the time. In the art world, the presence of the artist at an opening was not something that you could take for granted before. It started in the Nineties, as globalization took hold and the whole world became your backyard. I’m video calling you with my iPhone 7 – and I hate Apple. In order for them to make more money in California, we have been pushed to substitute working devices that require rare earth minerals to be manufactured. My iPhone 7 has a lot of limitations now, but only because they have chosen so. I refuse to get a new one until it does its core job.
SM Julian, sustainability has influenced your work, from the resources you use, to the ways you LON collaborate with local communities, to the extraction methods and finally the packaging.
JB Every aspect of my work has to be touched by me. There’s no outsourcing involved. I don’t consider myself a perfumer or part of an industry, even though I am, since I’m producing something. We’re small and it’s a segmented industry. In our shops, galleries, as we call them, in Argentina, Japan, North America, Europe and the Middle East, we have a direct relationship JB with our customers. We don’t use distributors or third party sellers. The perfume industry is booming and more and more people are re-discovering the evocative and transformative power
of scents. The Japanese have an expression, kanji, which translates as listening to scent, giving attention, dedication, to something. We witness people that had never considered wearing a perfume or having a diffuser in their home before coming in. Scent is a mood enhancer, that’s what they are discovering. A scent, as Lorcan pointed out, can be heavenly for one person, and dreadful for another.
Our own response to pleasant perfumes
SM I remember you once gave me an example, most people find neroli, obtained from orange blossoms, to be a pleasant perfume that reminds them of sunshine, summer and energetic bliss. If, when you were a child, you were often bullied near an orange tree, you’d probably have your very own personal response to it.
JB That’s the magic of natural scents. Artificial scents are a simulation, or rather an interpretation of nature, made by a perfumer in their chemical lab. That is economically more viable, but when we use this reference of a rose, we’re missing out on everything that a real rose’s scent can trigger. Our mind is not entertained by these interpretations, but it is by the complex molecules produced by nature.
SM In the Amazon, they are considered medicines.
JB Our best selling perfume is one that doesn’t really have a scent, but helps making our own scent more volatile. In that sense it’s something that Lorcan would enjoy too. In Japan, where the perfume industry is very appreciated, scent is also an aspect of Buddhism. It is mostly used for the spaces they inhabit. They don’t want to spray the perfume on their body, and they respect the privacy of the other. They wouldn’t want to impose their scent on others in a sub- way, for example. It’s a different story if you’re invited into their homes, entering their personal spaces.
Talking about colonialism and the exploitation of the Global South
SM I’d want to tackle the theme of colonialism, which is not a problem of the past. It just takes sneakier roads that still lead to the exploitation of the Global South at the advantage of the Global North. Lorcan, being Irish, I’m quite sure you have some thoughts on the subject, and Julian you named your brand after a native woman from Tierra del Fuego whose story is a bitter reminder of what Colonialism really means.
LON Ireland has gained its independence after hundreds of years of being bullied. Colonialism is
like having a foreign country as your national bully. It’s a reflection of how in nature big, heavy things tend to take advantage of their power. It happens within a school yard, a town, a region, a country, but also in the forest, between animals and plants, it’s how nature works.
SM That’s the survival of the fittest view of the natural world. I believe more in one that sees the webs of collaboration as the key element that drives evolution forward, rather than the tendency to compete. In other words, I choose Fritjof Capra over Charles Darwin.
JB Competition and bullying are a part of Nature, and our nature. In the modern globalizing trends, it’s about making as much money as possible, disregarding key elements such as people’s welfare, environmental impact or sustainability. It’s a model that hides most of its collateral costs and that is short term oriented. Being willing to create webs of collaboration, lower or share the profits, is what it’s about.
Competition is dooming us
SM The webs of collaboration would make us evolve, competition is dooming us.
LON The current war in Ukraine is an example of a bully not resisting the temptation of abusing its power. It’s not something I condone, but I recognise this tendency in nature. When a species overstates its power altering an ecosystem’s equilibrium, it might even cause the whole ecosystem to collapse, and ultimately itself, but that still does not prevent it from acting in such a way.
JB The thing with power is what do you do with it, do you use it for personal gain or to create a web of collaboration? The problem with colonialism is that it abuses its power to accumulate wealth. It dominates for personal gain. It has become obvious that it’s not only deeply unjust, but also not sustainable. I am a privileged white man, for sure, and was able to create a business that makes a profit, but the key is to share this profit with my suppliers and collaborators, while respecting the natural resources we use.
LON When Ireland got its independence a hundred years ago we were a poor country that had a bad relationship with its neighbors, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, for a long time. It wasn’t until the Eighties and Nineties that Ireland became a modern, rather well to do, well run, well educated country and the standard of living in general improved. That’s when it was finally looked at rationally by Great Britain and Northern Ireland. If there’s an inequality of wealth sharing, it’s inevitable that one side is weak.
Art can play a role in the ecological crisis
SM Now that wide spread psychological and social crises are following, like a growing shadow, the ecological crisis, do you think that art can play a role in, if not healing, at least helping, people feel less alone and powerless? Have you noticed a change in the artists’ interests or habits lately?
LON I find artists work best by doing what they do and hopefully their work will resonates in the world. You can have an artist like Morandi, whose works are sort of monkish and intimate, versus much more socially engaged artists like Richard Long, with whom I’ve been working for years. I’d say that his view is that Earth will survive anything, it has survived much worse menaces than us in the past. We are a blimp in the life span of the Earth. We probably won’t be here, but Earth will be thriving. Artists often feel that they can not do much more than pointing things out. Anselm Kiefer has a show in Venice at the moment which is about western consumerism going up in flames. It’s an indication of where the modern world is heading: self-combusting.
Sebastiano Mauri
Artist, novelist and director. In Italy, his most recent book La Nuova Terra, published by Guanda, was a finalist for the Stresa Prize for Fiction 2021. The novel follows along one man’s journey across the Amazon, his experiences with ayahuasca and the impact of nature on human existence. Sebastiano Mauri is of Italian-Argentinean decent and has spent his professional career working across Milan, New York and Buenos Aires.
Julian Bedel
Founder of Fueguia 1883, Julian Bedel is an Argentinian native who has found a second home in Milan. From an early age he was accustomed to the wilderness; his family owned a property in Entre Ríos where animals roamed and native species thrived. He pays homage to his ancestors and the native people of his land by creating scents that are inspired by local poems, places, music and paintings. Bedel goes about the perfumery process in an empirical way, fusing scientific elements with overlapping artistries and their synergies. Fueguia 1883 has boutiques located in Milan, New York, Tokyo, London, Buenos Aires and Jose Ignacio.
Lorcan O’Neil
Originally from Ireland, after decades of experience across the globe, Lorcan O’Neill opened Galleria Lorcan O’Neill nineteen years ago in Rome. His first shows were with Richard Long and Jeff Wall, artist whom he still collaborates with today. He choose the location of Galleria Lorcan O’Neill in the city center citing that it is inconsequential to have a space in Rome and portraying it to feel like Berlin or London. A believer that less is more, the all-white gallery features original vaulted ceilings and herringbone terracotta tiles with natural light seeping through.
