OLFAC Fieldwork in Taiwan 

Returning to Taiwan as part of OLFAC’s first phase of fieldwork, Freda Fiala has embarked on a sensory-driven investigation into the socio-material histories of camphor – a once central export commodity derived from the island’s native trees. With its distinctive, medicinal-sharp scent that once permeated forests, workshops, and trade routes, camphor was harvested primarily by Indigenous workers and circulated through imperial economies during Qing and Japanese colonial rule, becoming a sensitive linchpin in Taiwan’s role as a regional contact zone.

The research thus traces camphor’s cultural biographies not only as a material, but also as a mediator of economic, political and affective entanglements. Situating its knowledges within archival histories and their contemporary artistic enactments, it traces camphor’s role as a settler-colonial commodity and cultural agent entangled with labour, territorial conflict, and sensory control. Building on this, it will explore how contemporary artists and exhibitions engage with camphor’s material and symbolic residues – its lingering scent becoming a mode of critical inquiry into histories deeply embedded in bodies and histories of a globalised Taiwan. 

Images (c) Freda Fiala