The Seven Sauces

2003
Performative action
Media: costumes, trolley, 7 thermos (scent contents various), 7 CD players with headphones
Dimensions: 2.5’ x 3’ x 1.5’
Soundtrack duration: 1-5 min. loops

The Seven Sauces is the initial incarnation of The Seven Scents, a sound-scent journey that uses, as a point of departure, the legendary exoticism and adventure of the Seven Seas. As with The Seven Scents, The Seven Sauces provides an occasion for virtual travel. Targeting the high volume tourist population of Granville Island in Vancouver, this work presents options for traveling through a sampling station of matched smells and sounds associated with travel. Each set of smell/scent is named after one of the Seven Seas (e.g. Scent No. 2 North Atlantic is paired with the sounds of an airport terminal). Like spa therapists, the artists gently facilitate each participant’s sensorial reverie.

Transportation and memory are two key means of escape in the effort to get away. Transportation is conjured and memory is triggered via a series of white noise sounds recorded at seven targeted sites related to travel, in-between states of transitional spaces i.e. bus stations, airports, etc. These places in which travelers are often stuck offer, ironically, a space for reverie and contemplation where the process of getting there is often more enlightening than actually arriving. The series of scents is based on the desire for escape in combination with the inescapable everyday. Distilling sound and scent, romance and reality, the piece contemplates the fantasies of escape and the odious actualities of tourism.