the year without a summer

The Year Without a Summer is an ongoing project comprising performances, sound-video installations and sculptures, developed and exhibited since 2022. Its goal is to explore the interconnections and leaks between the climatic disruption that occurred in 1816 known as “the year without a summer” and the current climate crisis. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 created a cloud that blocked the sunlight from reaching the Earth, causing the summer never to come in 1816 with catastrophic consequences. This climatic event took place in the midst of the Romantic period, which is a fundamental factor for this project. The philosophical, aesthetic, and ecological ethos of Romanticism become poetically entwined, becoming the basis for a metaphorical comparison between that first climatic crisis and the current statu quo of late-capitalism, which can be considered catastrophic both in moral and ecological terms.

the project is structured through an opera, a gesamkuntswerk that, through different media, narrates the epic of human extinction. In our version of the opera, music has been replaced by perfumes in a durational succession of olfactory experiences. These experiences are traversed by a number of readings and performatic actions which require the audience’s involvement.

Three Movements// Alchemical machines that musically interpret each act of the opera through the dosage of its olfactory notes and the reading of the libretto by the performers.

Percey Shelley// performative sculpture that works by generating a fog with the peerfume "Sea Monster" during the second act.

assassin's suitcase with 13 opera perfumes

byron &Shelley poisons