nnother
Jenna Sutela, Elvia Wilk and Sissel Tolaas
This new sound work challenges ideas about care, bonding, and the process of gestation.
nnother was developed in conversation with Yannis Paloyelis from the Centre for Neuroimaging Science at King’s College London, who studies the social effects of the hormone oxytocin. Known for its role in childbirth and social bonding, oxytocin is also involved in human intimacy and group formation.
The sound work is a conversation between two interdependent entities whose relationship suggests a fictional future where new forms of family, including non-human life, replace the traditionally dominant care relationship between mother and child. A smell embedded in the walls of the installation interacts with traces of human touch to create a sense of invisible togetherness between strangers, designed by smell-researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas.
Image: Gut-Machine Poetry, Jenna Sutela, 2017. Photo: Mikko Gaestel.
About the contributor(s)
Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mould Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-20.
Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York. Currently, she's a contributing editor at e-flux journal and writes a monthly column on ethical quandaries for Monopol magazine. Her first novel, Oval, was published in June 2019 by Soft Skull press. She is the recipient of a 2019 Andy Warhol Arts Writers grant and a 2020 fellow at the Berggruen Institute.
Sissel Tolaas has been working, researching, and experimenting intensively with the topic of smell since 1990. Sissel is a pioneer and unique in her approach to smells and has developed a wide range of revolutionary projects worldwide with smells based upon her own knowledge: organic chemistry, linguistics, and visual art.