She Zephyr

SHE ZEPHYR is a six channel tape piece displayed in the fitting rooms at Gallery Lafayette Escales in Marseille. “Zephyr” is a name of a wind in the Ionian Sea, which depicts the feeling of a widow in Marseille as she discovers hidden love-letters of her husband with his mistress some decade ago, while they were supposedly at the beginning of their marriage. The letters have been sent from Patras.

Her husband constantly visited Patras in his twenties, as he was a raisin handler following the trade line from Patras to Marseille. The mistress was at the time seventy years old and quite heavy, their love was strong and had some kind of eerie depth and passion. Our thirty year old widow, who is a perfumist in profession, can now detect a side of her husband and his affection she couldn’t have imagined, and questions herself about beauty, loyalty, betrayal, loss, frustration, happiness and freedom.

As all six channels run simultaneously, each expressing her sentiments and thoughts:

Channel 1 represents thoughts of the young perfumist about herself while she is walking across the harbor in Marseille.

Channel 2 interprets thoughts of her about her husband, as she tries to bring to life his love affair in Peloponnese.     

Channel 3 follows her thoughts about probable interpretation of the old Greek mistress and her charm.

Channel 4 she turns her back to Patras’ harbor and its distinct, heavy smell (a harbor she never visited in her life) and gazes at the city where bitter orange-trees bloom.

Channel 5 she turns her back to Marseille harbor (her actual place having the same characteristic heavy smell that all harbors have) and seeks notes in order to create a new fragrance that connects the orient, the unknown, hope, the fear of getting older, comfort, Mediterranean flair and acceptance of the humanness, that she will name: She Zephyr.

Channel 6 is the combination of the five previous channels, thus the musical description of the fragrance She Zephyr

Technically: the sounds that represent the harbor in southern Greece sound mystical, like the wet earth drying, and comes from the place where the illegal couple met on the right-end coastline of the old harbor, which during the summertime is full of sunbathers. I worked on this project during the first two spring months of 2019 in Marseille, developing these characters, connecting notes of perfumes (the smell of the salty wind, the smell of the weather changes, the memory of the smell of the lovers skin, the smell of olive trees, the bad smell of the harbor, gasoline, garbage, mud), recording sounds of the city and re-working in the studio using timbral (spectral) techniques and omniscient narration.