Chrysanthemum Powder

CHRYSANTHEMUM POWDER investigates scent as a form of poetic interspecies communication. Haptic research gleaned from lived experiences on working farms, artist residences, and farm sanctuaries over the course of a year, form the base of CHRYSANTHEMUM POWDER. Some notes include the anointing of Holstein Dairy Cows, the powdering and perfuming of a herd of Urban Goats, the scent-based training of companion animals (namely a Scent Hound and various Urban Canines), and the speculative scent baiting of a Bear to protect a flock of Icelandic Sheep. Wafts of blackberries, mint, lemongrass, tea tree oil, peanut butter, copper, hay, ammonia, and manure pepper these gestures of interspecies kinship. Olfactory communication between species opens up broader conversations about the radical possibilities of care and scent-based practices to build less violent, more cooperative kin-networks. This paper thinks with various theorists including A. Breeze Harper, Christopher Sebastian McJetters, Constance Classen, Barbara Vinken, Deleuze and Guattari, Jakob von Uexküll, Che Gossett, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Timothy Pachirat, and Karen Barad. CHRYSANTHEMUM POWDER offers of a musky, floral, and at times putrid bouquet of entangled interspecies attachments to imagine the world-building possibilities of scent for animals, both human and non-human, living under carceral structures of domestication.