OLFACTORY PIECE created for the exhibition “TEN ENCOUNTERS”, curated by Saskia Wilson-Brown and presented at Olfactory Art Keller, the world’s first gallery dedicated exclusively to olfactory art. Lula Curioca was invited to represent Mexico by interpreting an encounter that, in some way, has shaped Mexican culture.

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ARTIST STATEMENT

To stick your nose into a convent in 17th-century Baroque Mexico. There, a Mexican nun and a Spanish viceroy fall in love. Two women from different worlds come together and break with convention. Convent and palace. Religion and eroticism. A love that smells of velvet curtains, incense during Mass, nervous sweat, stone cells, piles of books, dust, heavy makeup, dripping candles, and bodily sexual tension. An addictively human scent from another era.

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The 17th-century nun and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a precursor of feminism in Mexico. She devoted herself to religious life not out of divine vocation, but to fulfill her intellectual thirst for knowledge. When Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz met the Spanish viceroy of Mexico, María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga—or Lysi, as she called her—they fell in love. Their mutual devotion became part of Mexican literature, intertwining convent life, courtly festivities, and the development of a literary body of work of undeniable historical significance in Hispanic and world literature.

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