Curator: Valentín Roma
Opening: Tuesday 6th November 7pm
Free guided tours (from November 13th): Tuesday at 6.30 pm, Saturday and Sunday at noon
Guided tours by Duen Sacchi: 28/11, 5/12, 30/01 and 14/02, 6 pm

Conceived as an exercise in utopian imagining, this project by Duen Sacchi (Aguaray, Argentina, 1974) uses fetishes or charmed objects, drawings, wall prints and an artist’s book to narrate from various perspectives the metamorphosis undergone by nine characters whose bodies are connected with certain transformative forces, as well as the physical, spiritual and emotional changes these forces effect on them.

The term ‘organoleptic’ – from which the work takes its title – comes from Michel-Eugène Chevreul and more particularly his study Leçons de chimie appliquée à la teinture (1829; Lessons in Chemistry Applied to Dyeing), in which the scientist identifies a series of cognitive properties only observable when bodies are in immediate contact with our organs. This same word is also used with another meaning to refer to certain substances that encourage sensorial excitation and, lastly, to a technique to study the characteristics of soil that does not employ quantitative systems of measurement but instead assesses it by means ofthe senses of touch, smell, taste and sight. 

With these references as its starting point, Organoleptic rifles among the shelves of the invention of the Western anatomical body, taking an interest in its pathological figurations, its fantasies and obsessions. It also delves into the history of the invention of human organs and the records of the systematisation of the flesh, while exploring how inventories of colonial materials have shaken these codes of typification and genealogy, the way they have conjured up those conditions of the time, the eroticism and the shared freedom that go hand in hand with them or aid them.

To this end, Sacchi uses the clinical account and decolonial epistemologies, testimony and the narrative fantasy, scientific jargon and the body as grammar in which to found de-identifications, through which to rethink the meaning of certain binary antagonisms, among them the notion of externality and internality.