Where Breathing Becomes You

Where Breathing Becomes You presents a perfume formulated from sediments collected from the depths of the Molloy Deep at 5,500 meters below sea level, one of the deepest and most inaccessible zones of the Arctic Ocean. The perfume is neither contained nor packaged: it slowly disperses into the space, following the logic of its originating medium — the floating, drifting movement of particles in deep water.

The scent moves like an invisible current through the room, modulated by airflows and the presence of bodies. It is not an object to be seen or touched: it is a matter to be breathed. And in this minimal, everyday, and almost always unconscious act — breathing — the visitor becomes an active part of the process. There is no way to escape the work: the body absorbs it upon inhalation.
Breathing is a vital response that cannot be voluntarily interrupted. Although one can alter its frequency or depth, the body demands its rhythm back when one tries to stop it. In this piece, this automatic gesture becomes a material connection to distant geology and deep times. The perfume — composed of earthy, salty, and organic notes — evokes not only the abyssal origin of its source but introduces a fleeting fragment of this seabed into the human body.

The work explores an intimate and porous relationship between inside and outside, between matter and breath, between the most remote and the essential. What does it mean to breathe something that has lingered in darkness for millions of years? What memory does a particle carry as it passes through a body?

This work is the result of the collaboration with Givaudan company.

Scent, net, glass, solar pump system, 2025