Practice — Chaveli Sifre

Chaveli Sifre is a Puerto Rican artist based in Berlin. Sifre’s work centers healing practices, the sense of smell, botany, and the belief systems constructed around them. Interested in intersensorial entanglement as knowledge production, she creates installations, scents, paintings, and performative rituals that recover the long-lost intersections between science, spirituality, perfumery, medicine, magic, and care.

Sifre has exhibited in TBA21’s Meandering, Cordova; Welt ohne Außen, Martin Gropius Bau; Perspektive Wechseln, Hamburger Bahnhof; Natur Nach Humboldt, Botanisches Garten, Berlin; Welt Bilder, Salon Sophie Charlotte, Berlin; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, San Juan; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; Herbaria, Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuale, Habana, Cuba; Bienal Tropical del Caribe, I &II Puerto Rico; Las Antillas para los Antillanos, LACE, Los Angeles; Josh Lilley Gallery, London

The artist co-curated Peripheral Intuitions, a two-week-long program focused on the regenerative power of nightlife, and co-founded La Escuela del Olor, an artistic collective charting the olfactory landscape of the Caribbean.

Chaveli Sifre’s practice merges installations, scents, objects, paintings, interventions, and performative rituals enacted by people from her close personal life. Care, soft power, and ancestral Caribbean wisdom are used as starting points to offer a critical reflection on inherited colonial hierarchies through syncretic depictions that revert that which is considered holy, worthy, or significant. This intersensorial approach aims to highlight that emotions and knowledge are not mutually exclusive, while understanding their correlation as an active part of a decolonizing practice.

Through her scent-based works, Sifre brings smells of the Caribbean into the exhibition arena. Smells rising directly from folk medicine are a key element of her practice which explores access to health and its symbiotic relationship with believe in puertorican history.

“My practice has centered on rehabilitating our sense perception, approaching the senses as a political, cultural and personal arena that exposes us to multiple worlds and facilitates the process of dis-othering. Our lives have become immersed in communication and consumption technologies that alienate us from direct, somatic experiences. Art offers us a space to reintegrate our senses and connect with ideas, materials and with one another. By mindfully approaching these sensual encounters we rediscover dormant ways to to appreciate the world around us, generating spaces of kinship, collective reflection and new appreciations.”

Healer’s Mask 2019 Resin, White quartz, Honey

Aura Portraits | Lover’s Portrait, 2017 Printed silk & electric fan 130cm x 70cm In my practice, I explore different belief systems. My interest is not so much in what we believe but in the fact that we believe. This human tendency, present in every culture, has taken the shape of oracles, religion, and even think tanks; they manage our relationship to the unknown, the future, and the self. This particular piece is a homage to one of my favorite works by Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez Torres.

Coconut Bombs 2016-ongoing Dried coconuts, drinkable tinctures mixed with Puerto Rican medicinal plants, rum, and chloroform. Sealed with wax, as well as found glass closures. Variable size These sculptures examine Puerto Rico’s colonial history, turning a natural coconut into an eau de cologne flask.

Untitled (Enfleurage) Azucenas y manteca de cacao✨ created with cocoa butter and fresh tuberoses, (untitled) enfleurage refers to a traditional scent extraction method, layers of vegetable fat are laid into the wall, through a repetitive painterly action which enfolds the petals onto the fat, a sort of olfactory landscape that refers to sediments, and heritage both symbolic and material. It connects the Essex Market to La Placita in Puerto Rico, generating a social space for kinship, and collective remembering of home.

La Planta, Charging Box, 2016 Glass, printed silk, my mother’s crystal collection This sculpture addresses Puerto Rico’s current electrical crisis

Beeswax Mask 2019 Beeswax, Pollen, Malagueta oil, Eucalyptus oil, Peppermint oil

Personal Attention, 2016 Printed gowns, Seated sculpture, Mother and Aunt offering a Reiki session Turning the gallery space into a temple

Human Treatment, 2017, My work approaches the contemporary subject as a mediatized entity who has lost access to sensorial, spiritual experiences. Humane Treatment | Personal Attention are a series of performances, developed as part of an investigation into alternative forms of healing, proposing art as an arena that challenges conceptions of faith and health, transforming the opportunity of an exhibition into a space existing between a clinic and a temple were different belief systems, faiths, therapeutic methods and ritualistic elements are explored.

Only Fools II, 2012 trashcan, a bouquet of discarded fresh flowers, compilation sound of pulsars or dying stars

Máscara de Conchas, 2020 Shells, Pollen, Dried seaweed powder, paper, glue

Smoke Compositions | Tabonuco and Camphor is a ritual sculpture that invites us to consider the transformative power of smoke and its role in spiritual cleansing practices. The sculpture incorporates into the incense mixture tabonuco, a resin native to Puerto Rico used by the Tainos to light torches, and camphor, a substance commonly used in Caribbean cleansing practices known as "la limpia". As the scent rises from the censer, it evokes the potent power of smoke in cleansing rituals across cultures, from the burning of sage in Native American traditions to the use of incense in Catholic and Buddhist practices. "Smoke Compositions | Tabonuco and Camphor" offers a rich exploration of the cultural, historical and symbolic dimensions of smoke and its place in the human experience. Through the use of tabonuco and camphor, the sculpture connects us to ancestral Taino practices and Caribbean cleansing practices, particularly those linked to the Ifa tradition,

Caracolito, Ancestral Animism, 2022 Caribbean Seashells, oceanic scent composition, exploring symbolic and material heritage

The word Welle means wave in German. As part of my research into alternative health practices I offered people who visited my exhibition a Reiki session. Welle is a sculpture to sit on, modular, works by itself or is activated by a Reiki session or meditation. I like to develop works that work when we approach them multi-sensorially, to be touched, to be felt, these other ways of learning are usually forbidden in exhibition spaces. Welle is in itself a playful relaxation space for the viewer, simultaneously a wave and a ripple.

Granada Caliente 2018 Wax Globes, Found Glass, essential oils against body pain

Zilia (Aura Series) 2020 Printed Silk & Electric Fan scented aura portrait and homage. I wanted the wind to replicate the waves found in Zilia Sanchez’s work and also the feeling of sleeping under a soft Caribbean abanico breeze. The oceanic scent is reminiscent of Zilia’s actions between her canvases and the sea, composed of Myrrh, Lavandin, Coconut Isolate, Calone, Cypress, and Holy Basil. It is an open smell, de mar, amplitude, and generosity.

Smoke Compositions | Untitled (Theriaca Censer) 2022 Camphor, Ammonium Gum, and onycha operculum, ceramic "Smoke Compositions" is a ritual sculpture that takes the form of a penetrable censer in the shape of a modular, vibrating, zigzagging serpent, forming an ouroboros where incense burns. The shape of the censer evokes the winding course of the Gadalquivir River, where the work was activated, and the way the smoke rises and fills the air. The work also alludes to theriac, an ancient panacea made from various ingredients, including snakeskin, which was believed to cure most ailments. "Smoke Compositions" invites us to consider the intertwined histories of smell, medicine, commerce, and belief. The sculpture is a meditation on the enduring power of smell and its role in healing practices, as well as its associations with trade and exchange. By referencing theriacology, the work also speaks to the current fascination with panaceas and the promise of a universal cure.

Smoke Compositions - a meditation on the history of the Guadalquivir, the incense trade route, and incense as heritage, both symbolic and material Incense is a ritual as old as fire. The burning of incense refers to the combustion of aromatic material, a cross-cultural tradition that accompanies the history of mankind. Its longevity and widespread use reveal the dual nature of incense as a substance with both affective and symbolic meanings. In Smoke Compositions, visitors were invited to experience a participatory intervention, exploring a curated selection of resins that would have traveled along the historic Guadalquivir River trade route. The exhibition offers a space for reflection on the cultural significance of smoke, as a cross-cultural phenomenon linking spiritual and material (health) pursuits. Embedded in these materials, we can find our history of trade and mortality. Much of the incense is obtained from tree sap, this vital liquid nourishes the plant in the same way that our blood vitalizes our body and the river vitalizes the earthly body. Both blood and sap protect and regenerate. Resin is a tree's response to a wound, a liquid that flows, coating and finally coagulating, becoming hard and shiny, like a jewel.