Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau: What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest?

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Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau, "What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest?," 2019

Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau: What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest?

Performance & Opening, Thursday, September 5

Becoming Unreal performed by Xuan Ye

What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest?

What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest?, is a project by multidisciplinary artists Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau that challenges ideas of perception and mobility as they relate to invisible disability. First presented in the FOFA Gallery at Concordia University in Montréal, the project builds on themes previously explored in, Is It The Sun Or The Asphalt All I See Is Bright Black (2017). In light of Chloë Lum’s recently-diagnosed chronic illness, What Do Stones Smell Like focuses on the inability of others to understand the immobilizing effects of an illness that cannot be seen. Featuring a two-channel video installation with quadraphonic sound, the exhibition investigates the material nature of the body and the transformative power that objects have on the senses. 

Fashioned as an opera, What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest? tells the story of Golem, a character whose diminishing mobility results in a misunderstanding between her and her able-bodied social circle; the Choir. As Golem’s disability becomes worse, her perceptive abilities begin to relocate to her other senses including her sense of touch and smell. Golem learns to find solace in the objects that are nearest to her and her sensory connection with them grows.

What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest? ultimately serves as an inquiry into the ways that bodily difference can become an arena for new modes of research that seek to expand the notion of the human condition beyond the self.