Lowana Davies
Conference paper - Precarious Smellscapes
The local atmospheres that human and more-than-human bodies cohabit can be characterised as ‘smellscapes’. These smellscapes are becoming increasingly precarious as rising temperatures and anthropogenic pollutants alter the air, water and soil, disturbing human, and more-thanhuman ecosystems (Conrad et al., Dixon et al., 2010; 2017; Hoover, 2021; Porteus et al., 2018; Sentis et al, 2015). The manifold disruptions to smellscapes have also had unevenly distributed socioecological impacts on different bodies around the globe (Hsu, 2020; Classen et al., 1994, Nixon, 2011). Indigenous wisdoms as well as queer and feminist perspectives of smell propose radically different ways of being and thinking with more-than-humans that might sustain human and more-than-human futures. At a precarious moment in time where rising CO2 levels are having devastating impacts on diverse ecosystems across the globe, this research’s significant contribution will be a body of hybrid creative works that interrogate the emotional qualities and complex relationships between the senses of smell and our understandings of socioecological change. LOWANA DAVIES is part of the QUT community that stands on unceded Country of the Turrbal and Yugara people. She is an artist employing practice-led research to attune to the precarity of more-thanhuman smellscapes. Her work explores morethan-human centered approaches to care for multispecies smellscapes such as oceans and air