Dario Zumkeller
MANIFESTO OF THE OLFACTIVISM
Poets of the 21st century, this is the time to turn your back on the 20th century!
Hazard! Hazard! and hazard again!
Hate the word and the phoneme
Hate speaking and writing
Hate the graphics, phonetics and sound
Hate digital poetry and electronic literature
Hate algorithms
Hate automation and psychic automatisms
Hate transhumanism and liberation from death
Hate logic
Love silence
Love anonymity
Love the sense of smell
Bibliography
Accame V. (1981) Il segno poetico, Edizioni d’Arte/Zarathustra, Milano
Daum M. “Op-Ed: Smells like ... a Westsider: All wet lawn and the sweat of a trophy wife”: Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2014. Sourced at: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-oe-daum-los-angeles-smell-goeltzenleuchter-sant-20140703-column.html
D’Errico Anna (2019) Il senso perfetto, Codice Edizioni
Gerkin C. R., Castro B. J.: "The number of olfactory stimuli that humans can discriminate is still unknown" elife (2015) Sourced at: https://elifesciences.org/articles/08127#content
Jaquet Ch. (2015) L’art olfactif contemporain, Editions Classiques Garnier, Parigi Martini M. S. (1988) Breve storia dell'avanguardia, Nuove Edizioni, Napoli
Sanguineti E. (2010) Cultura e Realtà, Feltrinelli
Spatola A. (1978) Verso la poesia totale, Paravia, Torino
Dario Zumkeller is an Italian writer and singer. In 2016 his debut poetry book "La Calce di Ulkrum" published by Parola Abitata, appeared. Some of his texts are included in different Italian poetry magazine.
After participating in various spoken word competitions, in 2017 Zumkeller participated in Sky tv talent show StraFactor. He won the Strafactor 2nd edition with two music poems "Vita Talassocratica" and "Ho perso il mio nome" performed at the X Factor final at the Assago Forum in Milan. In 2018, Dario Zumkeller participated again in the 3th edition of Strafactor, being selected as a finalist with his music poetry “I Cieli Grezzi di Ulkrum”.
In 2019 he was among the fifteen finalists selected for the 1M NEXT contest; whose winners performed at the 1th May concert in Rome. In November of the same year, Dario Zumkeller organized the event "Naples, Art Gallery of Visual Poetry" exhibiting one of his works of visual poetry on all the advertising boards of the metropolitan city.
In 2020 the musical album La Calce di Ulkrum became available on all digital music stores together with the new single "Frutti Marciti" with Giuseppe Spinelli’s artistic production.
In 2021 he published the visual poetry book Generazione Disfagia available on Amazon.
Poetry was the research field of various linguistic transformations and forms of expression created by the historical avant-gardes in the early decades of the twentieth century and by the neo-avant-gardes of the second half of the twentieth century until the 1970s. Nowadays, poetry has returned to the linearity of the free verse.
Poetic research has fallen into forgetfulness and no longer had the intellectual stimuli to create a discourse on human being and the world through new poetics and style techniques.
The avant-gardes broke through the wall of conformity and academic literary rules. Here next, I describe the progressive steps of avant-gardes briefly.
The first innovations occurred with the performative written and oral word such as the free prose verse in A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud (1873) and the humorous poem of the Hydropathes by Émile Goudeau.
Successively, poetry became pure phonetic sound and combination of free words, for instance: the Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s liberty words and the Zang-Tumb-Tumb (1914-1915), Futurist Piedigrotta (1916) and the Pentagram Poetry by Francesco Cangiullo (1923), the Poem of the End represented by a blank page, created by the Russian ego-futurist poet Vasily Ivanovich Gnedov (1913), and the words cut out with scissors and drawn from a bag by Tristan Tzara (Manifesto on weak and bitter love, 1920).
Through Isidore Isou's Lettrism (1946) the words broke-up into phonemes aligned on the page and then scattered to create pictures with the letters. Concrete poetry or visual poetry was born in Brazil in the 1950s with the Grupo Noigandres composed by Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari (Accame 1981). At this time words become graphic signs.
In Italy, the greatest spokespeople of visual poetry in the 1960’s were Luciano Caruso, Stelio Maria Martini, Enrico Bugli. They were members of the magazine ‘Linea Sud’ (1963) and ‘Continuum’ (1968) (Martini 1988, Sanguineti, 2010).
The poetic research advanced with the ‘Total Poetry’ by Adriano Spatola (1978). ‘Total Poetry’ considered every artistic and techno-scientific field as a source to make poetry. This context included visual poetry, a semantics combination between word and image, and the sound poetry of Arrigo Lora Totino (1928-2016) and Henri Chopin (1922-2008) as a post-futurist evolution of phonetic sound applied to vocality and electroacoustic technologies.
This brief summary of avant-garde poetry highlights a communicative direction towards three human senses: sight, hearing, tactile gestures.
In 1912, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti pointed out this issue writing in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature as follows:
Despite these attempts to introduce the odors in art, the sense of smell has been never considered by poetic research and has never had its own development path over time.
Contemporary poetry has neglected the sense of smell as a language and a typical form of performative expression.
On the other hand, the relationship of the fine arts with the sense of smell was different. In 1993, the Italian-Canadian artist Clara Ursitti was included in a review entitled Self-Portrait in Scent at the Artist-Run gallery in Toronto. She created odors extracted from her body (armpits, vagina, feet) as a portrait of herself. Odors were diffused through ventilation systems installed in the gallery (D'Errico, 2019).
In 2012, the French author and director Violaine de Carné with the company Le TIR et la Lyre performed an olfactory theatrical show entitled Les parfumes de l'âme. Each character was associated with a smell; twelve smells coinciding with the twelve characters of the dramaturgy. The relationship between theatre and smells was directly experienced with the audience in the hall. The smells were emanated with automatic olfactory diffusion systems created by the French company Sigmacom (Jaquet 2015).
In 2014, the Sillage project by Brian Goeltzenleuchter was hosted at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The artist created fragrances in bottles that represented the smells of different city neighborhoods. At the event, visitors were sprayed with the smell of their neighborhood and were encouraged to interact with others who had a different smell (Daum, 2014).
Having mentioned these examples of olfactory art, let us continue by talking about poetry.
The olfactory communication is elusive, dispersive, and has a slow dynamism that is difficult to place in memory (except in particular cases). Furthermore, science has never managed to create a system for the classification and quantification of odors (Gerkin and Castro 2015). The sense of smell is invisible and not tangible. Human nature tends not to consider the invisibility. The sense of smell is not audible, so it develops in silence. Human nature tends not to give much importance to silence.
Olfactivism take into account the sensory receptors of the nose and the use of the olfactory organ to transmit imaginative and communicative scenarios through the propagation of scents and stenches concerning the world.
Olfactivism must become the gasoline of the turbinate and nasal mucous membranes, which with the graceful movements of a dancer, it ascends into the brain slowly. The brain, this porous organ, inside the skull, expands with the scents of poetic olfaction. The mediocre intellects expand widely and the super-sensitive faculties, hidden in the labyrinth of our unconscious, will turn from human into the ‘too human’.
We should not confuse the ‘too human’ with the transhuman. The ‘too human’ is the gift of nature and the nose is its center as the supersensitive antenna of the world. The nose is no longer the organ from which we emit and expel air or snot. The nose, as the ultimate purpose of poetry, is the unlimited area from which our rational and intuitive faculties are stimulated but nowadays they have been got decrepit by automatic human actions.
Hence, Olfactivism becomes the maximum expression of reality and the soul affirmation of the myth that insinuates itself inside the nose with the gentle and sinuous touch of the frontal and sphenoid sinus until the achievement of the nasolacrimal duct permanently.
In the nasolacrimal duct there is the myth of the man full of spirit and heroic-warrior action that emerged from the poetic odors. Therefore, olfactory is the foundation of life; it is the shadowy tailing of reality in the full development.
Olfactivism is a great entelechy of mythological predisposition with the features of a mercurial creature. Someone has a nose for business or in the search for truffles. Instead, through olfactory poetry, we will get the nose of myth and the superhuman.
The nose has a life of its own and has a strong desire to assimilate, to learn, to capture the essences that revolve around it in complete freedom. Smells are the only truly ultra-human realities that are left to us. They have not constraints. Nobody can stop odors. None uniform has the power to raise the red-circled signage shovel to odors.
Smells are the authentic libertarian anarchists existing in the data vampire algorithm civilization. The wonderful smells go around the urban jungles in Mercedes pretending to be sellers of golden keys opening the doors of new bridges.
On the top of anarchist smells, there is Poetry that becomes olfactory. The smells, replacing the phonemes, become the heart of new poetry together with the members of the nasal orchestra: the turbinate, the sinuses, the foramina, and the hollows.
Olfactivism has a pre-revolutionary function: spreading the silence for the process of molecular dissolution of humanity caged in the spiked square where it is no longer possible to design an original aromatic formation.
Hell will break loose with olfaction. The uranic sparks will be unstoppable with the advent of a new era for the spiritual union. If the world will be saved by a handful of soldiers, these will be odors and their general will be the Nose.
And what about the olfactory poet? What is the role of the olfactory poet? Poet has to subjugate to the will of the Gods-odors. Furthermore, poet has the duty to follow specific rules:
Olfactivism has the purpose to give a shock to the poetic research which has now stopped for almost forty years caused by the inability or unwillingness of most poets to create a bridge between the poetry of the twentieth century and the new century of this second millennium.
Poetic research has fallen into forgetfulness and no longer had the intellectual stimuli to create a discourse on human being and the world through new poetics and style techniques.
The avant-gardes broke through the wall of conformity and academic literary rules. Here next, I describe the progressive steps of avant-gardes briefly.
The first innovations occurred with the performative written and oral word such as the free prose verse in A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud (1873) and the humorous poem of the Hydropathes by Émile Goudeau.
Successively, poetry became pure phonetic sound and combination of free words, for instance: the Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s liberty words and the Zang-Tumb-Tumb (1914-1915), Futurist Piedigrotta (1916) and the Pentagram Poetry by Francesco Cangiullo (1923), the Poem of the End represented by a blank page, created by the Russian ego-futurist poet Vasily Ivanovich Gnedov (1913), and the words cut out with scissors and drawn from a bag by Tristan Tzara (Manifesto on weak and bitter love, 1920).
Through Isidore Isou's Lettrism (1946) the words broke-up into phonemes aligned on the page and then scattered to create pictures with the letters. Concrete poetry or visual poetry was born in Brazil in the 1950s with the Grupo Noigandres composed by Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari (Accame 1981). At this time words become graphic signs.
In Italy, the greatest spokespeople of visual poetry in the 1960’s were Luciano Caruso, Stelio Maria Martini, Enrico Bugli. They were members of the magazine ‘Linea Sud’ (1963) and ‘Continuum’ (1968) (Martini 1988, Sanguineti, 2010).
The poetic research advanced with the ‘Total Poetry’ by Adriano Spatola (1978). ‘Total Poetry’ considered every artistic and techno-scientific field as a source to make poetry. This context included visual poetry, a semantics combination between word and image, and the sound poetry of Arrigo Lora Totino (1928-2016) and Henri Chopin (1922-2008) as a post-futurist evolution of phonetic sound applied to vocality and electroacoustic technologies.
This brief summary of avant-garde poetry highlights a communicative direction towards three human senses: sight, hearing, tactile gestures.
In 1912, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti pointed out this issue writing in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature as follows:
We need to insert three elements into the literature that have been neglected so far:Instead, in 1924, the Italian futurist painter Fedele Azari wrote the manifesto entitled Futurist flora and plastic equivalents of artificial odors which dealt with the creation of artificial flowers and perfumes.
1. The Noise (manifestation of the dynamism of objects)
2. The Weight (flying power of objects)
3. The Smell (ability to scatter objects)
For example, we need to strive making the landscape of smells that a dog perceives or listening to the engines and play their speeches.
Despite these attempts to introduce the odors in art, the sense of smell has been never considered by poetic research and has never had its own development path over time.
Contemporary poetry has neglected the sense of smell as a language and a typical form of performative expression.
On the other hand, the relationship of the fine arts with the sense of smell was different. In 1993, the Italian-Canadian artist Clara Ursitti was included in a review entitled Self-Portrait in Scent at the Artist-Run gallery in Toronto. She created odors extracted from her body (armpits, vagina, feet) as a portrait of herself. Odors were diffused through ventilation systems installed in the gallery (D'Errico, 2019).
In 2012, the French author and director Violaine de Carné with the company Le TIR et la Lyre performed an olfactory theatrical show entitled Les parfumes de l'âme. Each character was associated with a smell; twelve smells coinciding with the twelve characters of the dramaturgy. The relationship between theatre and smells was directly experienced with the audience in the hall. The smells were emanated with automatic olfactory diffusion systems created by the French company Sigmacom (Jaquet 2015).
In 2014, the Sillage project by Brian Goeltzenleuchter was hosted at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The artist created fragrances in bottles that represented the smells of different city neighborhoods. At the event, visitors were sprayed with the smell of their neighborhood and were encouraged to interact with others who had a different smell (Daum, 2014).
Having mentioned these examples of olfactory art, let us continue by talking about poetry.
The olfactory communication is elusive, dispersive, and has a slow dynamism that is difficult to place in memory (except in particular cases). Furthermore, science has never managed to create a system for the classification and quantification of odors (Gerkin and Castro 2015). The sense of smell is invisible and not tangible. Human nature tends not to consider the invisibility. The sense of smell is not audible, so it develops in silence. Human nature tends not to give much importance to silence.
Olfactivism take into account the sensory receptors of the nose and the use of the olfactory organ to transmit imaginative and communicative scenarios through the propagation of scents and stenches concerning the world.
Olfactivism must become the gasoline of the turbinate and nasal mucous membranes, which with the graceful movements of a dancer, it ascends into the brain slowly. The brain, this porous organ, inside the skull, expands with the scents of poetic olfaction. The mediocre intellects expand widely and the super-sensitive faculties, hidden in the labyrinth of our unconscious, will turn from human into the ‘too human’.
We should not confuse the ‘too human’ with the transhuman. The ‘too human’ is the gift of nature and the nose is its center as the supersensitive antenna of the world. The nose is no longer the organ from which we emit and expel air or snot. The nose, as the ultimate purpose of poetry, is the unlimited area from which our rational and intuitive faculties are stimulated but nowadays they have been got decrepit by automatic human actions.
Hence, Olfactivism becomes the maximum expression of reality and the soul affirmation of the myth that insinuates itself inside the nose with the gentle and sinuous touch of the frontal and sphenoid sinus until the achievement of the nasolacrimal duct permanently.
In the nasolacrimal duct there is the myth of the man full of spirit and heroic-warrior action that emerged from the poetic odors. Therefore, olfactory is the foundation of life; it is the shadowy tailing of reality in the full development.
Olfactivism is a great entelechy of mythological predisposition with the features of a mercurial creature. Someone has a nose for business or in the search for truffles. Instead, through olfactory poetry, we will get the nose of myth and the superhuman.
The nose has a life of its own and has a strong desire to assimilate, to learn, to capture the essences that revolve around it in complete freedom. Smells are the only truly ultra-human realities that are left to us. They have not constraints. Nobody can stop odors. None uniform has the power to raise the red-circled signage shovel to odors.
Smells are the authentic libertarian anarchists existing in the data vampire algorithm civilization. The wonderful smells go around the urban jungles in Mercedes pretending to be sellers of golden keys opening the doors of new bridges.
On the top of anarchist smells, there is Poetry that becomes olfactory. The smells, replacing the phonemes, become the heart of new poetry together with the members of the nasal orchestra: the turbinate, the sinuses, the foramina, and the hollows.
Olfactivism has a pre-revolutionary function: spreading the silence for the process of molecular dissolution of humanity caged in the spiked square where it is no longer possible to design an original aromatic formation.
Hell will break loose with olfaction. The uranic sparks will be unstoppable with the advent of a new era for the spiritual union. If the world will be saved by a handful of soldiers, these will be odors and their general will be the Nose.
And what about the olfactory poet? What is the role of the olfactory poet? Poet has to subjugate to the will of the Gods-odors. Furthermore, poet has the duty to follow specific rules:
• The olfactory poet must totally exclude the written word, the verbal word, the sound dimension, the graphic signs and images of concrete and visual poetry.
• The olfactory poet must promote silence as a disdain, rejection, and hatred of the inauthentic, impersonal, devastating, and empty literary words. The silence that cuts through our ancestral memory for a return to primordial being without writing.
• Olfactivism is the reaction to the empty repetitive exercise of the sentimental, personalistic, and pseudo-crepuscular poetry.
• The olfactory poet agrees the repression of written poetry as a fetish of self-satisfaction of the uncritical and self-referential author.
• Olfactivism is the reaction to the sterile hyper-verbal discussions of public opinion founded by the general idea that “we must talk about everything” and “I want to say what I want” to the detriment of enlightening silence.
• The olfactory performance must be exhibited indoors, in a not too large spaces with a small audience. A source of air stream is recommended for a better spreading of odors emitted into the environment. As an alternative, artist can use two electric fans located on the left and right of himself and towards the audience for a better diffusion of odors.
• The olfactory poet must perform in black clothes without talking to anyone, without introducing himself, without saying his name and other generalities. He must wear a backpack positioned in the front of the body to let him easily take in the sprays of perfumes or stenches.
• The olfactory performance must last no more than 10 minutes. The management of time is focused on sniffing and breathing between one smell and another smell. Whether the performance requires many different types of smells, is recommended the delivering of containers full of coffee beans to the audience before the beginning of the performance. Coffee beans act as a mental distraction once smelled to avoid situations of olfactory fatigue. The smell of the coffee allows the reset of the tired nose (D'Errico 2019). This situation happens when too many odors are smelled in a short time.
• Based on the favorable economic circumstances, the olfactory poet is free to create new scented fragrances or stenches with the collaboration of chemists or perfumers, otherwise artists can use odors available on the market.
• The smells must be chosen or created regarding to a specific theme and central idea.
• The olfactory poet must pay attention to his performance without being influenced by the buzz of the audience or any protests and complaints from it. The performance must be documented with the camera including the reactions of the audience. Whatever reaction occurs, the olfactory poet must continue inexorably.
• The olfactory performance must be carried out in a warm temperature so that the smells can be well spread and sensed.
Olfactivism has the purpose to give a shock to the poetic research which has now stopped for almost forty years caused by the inability or unwillingness of most poets to create a bridge between the poetry of the twentieth century and the new century of this second millennium.
Hazard! Hazard! and hazard again!
Hate the word and the phoneme
Hate speaking and writing
Hate the graphics, phonetics and sound
Hate digital poetry and electronic literature
Hate algorithms
Hate automation and psychic automatisms
Hate transhumanism and liberation from death
Hate logic
Love anonymity
Love the sense of smell
 |
| Olfactivism Logo |
Accame V. (1981) Il segno poetico, Edizioni d’Arte/Zarathustra, Milano
Daum M. “Op-Ed: Smells like ... a Westsider: All wet lawn and the sweat of a trophy wife”: Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2014. Sourced at: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-oe-daum-los-angeles-smell-goeltzenleuchter-sant-20140703-column.html
D’Errico Anna (2019) Il senso perfetto, Codice Edizioni
Gerkin C. R., Castro B. J.: "The number of olfactory stimuli that humans can discriminate is still unknown" elife (2015) Sourced at: https://elifesciences.org/articles/08127#content
Jaquet Ch. (2015) L’art olfactif contemporain, Editions Classiques Garnier, Parigi Martini M. S. (1988) Breve storia dell'avanguardia, Nuove Edizioni, Napoli
Sanguineti E. (2010) Cultura e Realtà, Feltrinelli
Spatola A. (1978) Verso la poesia totale, Paravia, Torino
Dario Zumkeller is an Italian writer and singer. In 2016 his debut poetry book "La Calce di Ulkrum" published by Parola Abitata, appeared. Some of his texts are included in different Italian poetry magazine.
After participating in various spoken word competitions, in 2017 Zumkeller participated in Sky tv talent show StraFactor. He won the Strafactor 2nd edition with two music poems "Vita Talassocratica" and "Ho perso il mio nome" performed at the X Factor final at the Assago Forum in Milan. In 2018, Dario Zumkeller participated again in the 3th edition of Strafactor, being selected as a finalist with his music poetry “I Cieli Grezzi di Ulkrum”.
In 2019 he was among the fifteen finalists selected for the 1M NEXT contest; whose winners performed at the 1th May concert in Rome. In November of the same year, Dario Zumkeller organized the event "Naples, Art Gallery of Visual Poetry" exhibiting one of his works of visual poetry on all the advertising boards of the metropolitan city.
In 2020 the musical album La Calce di Ulkrum became available on all digital music stores together with the new single "Frutti Marciti" with Giuseppe Spinelli’s artistic production.
In 2021 he published the visual poetry book Generazione Disfagia available on Amazon.
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