(2024)

Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking. — Lynn Margulis

Regarding the anthropocentric era full of negligence towards the environment, there are many people that started to take action against extractivist attitudes long ago, attempting to generate horizontal relations with the biosphere based on respect. In order to relate and interconnect with other species, it is helpful to understand each other’s method of expression. 

In that line, Chemical Calls of Care is an interactive installation that presents a system to try to establish audio-olfactory communication with the non-human, in this case with some plants and elements from an adjacent park. The project explores the difficulty of getting in contact with other entities using chemical communication, a nonverbal language that we do not articulate fluently, and acts as a proposal to start practicing it.

For that Chemical Calls of Care presents an arrangement of flexible tubes and fans that bring chemical information from an adjacent park into the installation space. Using the same method in reverse will allow the public to send olfactory messages to the outside, therefore performing chemical calls. 

Those messages comprise extracts from plats that provide nutrients to promote natural processes that enhance the health and balance of ecosystems. This aims to cuddle the receiver vegetation and soil with only restorative messages of care. When people entre the space they find a text with some instructions about how to operate with them:

These bottles contain extracts from plants that can be sent as chemical messages. As they contribute with nutrients, natural elements and microorganisms that improve the health of the recipient plants and soil, they are exclusively messages of care.

In addition, gas sensors provide data from the composition of the air that is translated into sound, a lexicon that might be easier to understand by various unalike species.