“Carne Vale – Olfactory Becomings” OLFAC at the 2025 IFTR Conference in Cologne
What if we approach performance from the sense of olfaction and multisensorial perceptions? What if it lingered less in the retina – and more in the nose? At this year’s International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) conference, held at the University of Cologne, Freda Fiala and Julia Ostwald stepped into exactly these questions.
Our panel Carne Vale – Olfactory Becomings invited audiences to consider the shifting role of smell in performance and dance studies. The title, a playful nod to both “farewell, flesh” (carne, vale!) and the carnival of ideas that programmatically unfolded during the week, framed our discussion: As we borrowed a term from Deleuze and Guattari, we asked: what if the body in performance is not primarily a figure on stage, but rather a zone of intensity, of proximity, diffusion, and volatile contact?
Julia Ostwald opened the panel with her paper Odopower in Civic Festivities in the City of London, around 1983 and 1613, offering a compelling exploration of the relationship between smell, choreography, and power in public space. Drawing on the Lord Mayor‘s pageantries of the early 17th century in the City of London, stagings of olfactory desires were analyzed as a sensual form of governance in the context of early capitalist trade. The paper introduced the concept of odopower to describe how power engages with smell and movement, arguing that central premises of this concept still apply today. The paper’s publication is forthcoming.
Freda Fiala followed with A Geosensoric Binge: Performing “Asia” as Olfactory Method, a dive into the sensory excess of Taiwanese artist Yu Cheng-ta’s (余政達) flamboyant para-character FAMEME. The paper examined how Yu’s work engages and satirises cultural stereotypes, while also tracing how Taiwan’s “live exhibition” format (huo zhanshi, 活展示) enables new transregional and institutional articulations. The project explores how olfactory codes travel and transform, complicating notions of authenticity, representation, and identity in globalised cultural networks.
A publication of the paper is forthcoming.
Beyond the panel, the atmosphere at IFTR 2025 was refreshingly porous. With hundreds of participants from across continents and disciplinary boundaries, it sparked lively conversations – some of them quite literally lingered in the air.
Stay tuned for upcoming publications!
Images (c) Freda Fiala, Julia Ostwald