ABOUT SENTIDO
Sentido Collective wants to celebrate your senses and stimulate your sensitivity. As humans, we are excellent at categorizing, classifying, labelling…, all these imaginary boundaries can be useful to organize our thoughts and to plan ahead of us, but they can also get in the way of how we experience the world. Categories give us certainty in exchange for fluidity. Through an exploration of your senses, we take a deeply empirical approach to shaking up your world-view. Our goal is for your life experience to become richer. Sentido Collective is a collaborative endeavor by film-maker and olfactory artisan Brindusa I. Nastasa and transdisciplinary scientist Juan O. Perea-García.
past projects
IK VLUCHTTE NAAR ROTTERDAM (NETHERLANDS)
How to get home when we are not with our bodies? The material aspects of our experiences are unique. The shape of our bodies, where they are in space and time, the things and people we interact with may be different. But the way we live those experiences have enough in common that we can relate to others who felt the same. By portraying the common psychological underpinnings of sexual abuse, trauma and dissociation, and healing, ‘I fled to Rotterdam’ brings attention to the shared experiences of all too many women. ‘I fled to Rotterdam’ rejects a depiction of powerless victimhood, ceaselessly fleeing. It also refuses to represent the aggressor. Instead, it focuses on the odyssey to take the first step towards healing - to come back home to ourselves.
Project supported by Droom en Daad through Makersloket.
PRIMATE EXTERNAL EYE APPEARANCE (SINGAPORE/NETHERLANDS)
Eyes are tremendously important social stimuli for humans. Chances are you know a saying to the effect of “eyes are windows to the soul” in your own mother tongue. For over two decades, we thought the importance that eyes had for humans was not shared with any other animals, including our closest relatives, the primates. It is often the case that we set out to study other animals because we want to know how we compare to them. Looking at the eyes of other primate species with the notion that we are a special case resulted in a grave underestimation of their diversity and beauty. After years of carefully open-minded observation, we enjoy a picture of primate external eye appearance that is as rich as it is uncertain.
An ongoing effort at understanding ecological, social, and evolutionary forces that shaped the exquisite diversity in external eye appearance across different primate lineages.
BLUE BANKS (ROMANIA)
Blue Banks is about two parallel struggles: the inner and the outer fight. Our goal is to look beyond public policies, beyond the borders of the liberal states to which we aspire. We want to look at the concrete reality, where every woman lives with herself, where they feel freedom or its absence in their own particular way. We set for ourselves the question of how does one gain that inner freedom which in turn naturally produces the “hormone” of equality in societies in which it is still commonplace for women to be just an object of sexual desire or abuse. What happens with their feelings when they perceive injustice? What obstructs and what encourages them in building their own identity and not just mimicking what is at hand. How do they manage to attain their own?
Part of a multimedia exhibition organized in Bucharest, 2018.
MAO'S ICE CREAM (CHINA/NETHERLANDS)
China is home to the world’s largest ageing society. But elders in China do not want to be left out. They reclaim the public space with music, dance and karaoke. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, they haven't had a chance to express themselves as humans and especially as women. Now, they are taking back what was taken away from them - visibility, freedom of expression and of beauty.
Part of multimedia exhibition Mao's Ice Cream in Studio Z, Rotterdam.
future projects
Smell-tales
Storytelling is a cornerstone of human development. Verbal information (first orally, then in written form) has traditionally taken the brunt of information-bearing. Visual information can sometimes supplement or enhance verbal information (as in cinema). But, what is the fundamental link between smell and information in the context of storytelling?
Smell-tales involves an interactive session in which participants will share the ideas and sensations that selected odors evoke. The session will also include exposure to experimental olfactory narrations. Olfactory narrations will be carefully designed to illuminate questions relating mainly to the ambiguity of smell in the context of storytelling. The applicants’ storytelling practices will be formalized in a visual report. This will include a network-like sociogram in which scents are linked to the things that participants report thinking of when exposed to the smell. The thickness of the lines linking smells and their reported odorants will depend on the number of participants that report the same smell.
HOLY BEAUTY
Holy Beauty seeks to demystify the relationship between the sacred and the aesthetic. Organized religions throughout history have influenced their contemporary aesthetics, sometimes indirectly by inspiring artists, sometimes directly by vetting what is acceptable, or even by hard-coding in their scriptures what should and what should not be represented. The opposite is also true - techniques, trends and technologies have all had a deep impact on religious representations of the sacred. This two-way interaction between religion and art is permeable, fluid, and so resists identification.
Instead of tackling the issue of the relationship between sacred and aesthetic conceptually, Holy Beauty reconfigures the space around sacred imagery to prompt our sensory space to explore this relationship on its own accord. To bring the spectator to this tense space of exploration, Christian Orthodox iconography is embedded in the contemporary aesthetics of the sensational that are more typical of marketing and branding. On the one hand, it is explicit dogma to shun wealth and the sensational. On the other hand, it is traditional for Orthodox iconography to appeal to our senses through vivid sensations. In the middle, Holy Beauty stands dangerously close to blasphemy by updating the very aesthetics of the sacred.
contact us
