- New essays by Hsuan L. Hsu and Harris Chowdhary
- Eighteen new collages by Gray Wielebinski
- Access to the performance soundtrack by Manuka Honey
- Two incense papers forming one caltrop scented with Surface and Subterranean, composed by agustine zegers
- Performance documentation featuring Slug and Martina Derosa
In Scent and Petroculture, Hsuan L. Hsu considers how the rituals of American suburban life become tropes of gendered nationalist fantasy that sustain the country's dependence on oil. Hsu describes the language of cheerleading within We Got Spirit as ‘a kind of exorcism that both embodies and estranges us from the insidious fixation on fossil fuels at the heart of “all-American” suburban culture.’ Reflecting on Surface and Subterranean, Hsu argues that the scents compel ‘participants to confront the violent and unsustainable dimensions of suburban car culture, football, and perfuming.’
Harris Chowdhary’s essay, Senioritis in the Thickened Present, takes as its point of departure the phenomenon of ‘senioritis’—the malaise experienced by American high school students approaching graduation, dragging their feet toward a future that has already been promised to them. Chowdhary frames this condition as a wider American psychodrama in which hope and effort lose meaning amidst geopolitical and ecological collapse. Through Wielebinski’s newly commissioned collages, however, another possibility emerges. As Chowdhary writes, ‘Wielebinski cuts up the found world… so that the apparatus which produced it becomes legible as such, and another possibility inside it becomes visible.’
Co-published by Dean’s Bottom, London and Speculative Scent Lab, Chicago, 2026
84 pages, section-sewn with internal pockets to hold incense papers and instruction card
110mm × 70mm
Edition of 500
Contributors: Harris Chowdhary, Hsuan L. Hsu, Manuka Honey, Gray Wielebinski, agustine zegers
Managing Editor: Fahad Mayet
Editorial Support: Seán Elder
Design: Found in Dialogue (Joel Antoine-Wilkinson)
ISBN: 9781068180514
Gray Wielebinski
Gray Wielebinski (b. 1991, Dallas) is an artist whose practice is interested in the role that power plays in historical and contemporary forms of myth-making and narratives, and how this intrinsic power dynamic affects how we conceive of ourselves, others, and the world around us. Gray works in a variety of mediums, incorporating video, performance, collage, installation, sculpture, conceptual research, and more. The process of collaging runs through his practice in many forms – reconfiguring and transforming iconography and visual codes that interrogate dominant frameworks and belief systems and propose alternatives. He is also continuously attentive to the fraught status of American and UK self-mythology and landscape, and recent work has focused on surveillance, strategy, and secrecy, particularly as these intersect with questions of gender, sexuality, and the social.
Wielebinski’s solo and duo exhibitions include: Bring Me Men, Nicoletti, London, UK (2026); Frieze London, solo booth with Nicoletti, London, UK (2025); Of course I know eternity: Wilhelm Traeger + Gray Wielebinski, Austrian Cultural Forum (2025), London, UK (2025); The Red Sun is High, The Blue Low, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, UK (2023); Fratricide, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Love and Theft, 12.26 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Oil and Water, Hales Gallery, London, UK (2023); and Selfridges Art Block Commission, London, UK (2023).
Manuka Honey
Bringing chaos, sensuality, and ecstatic motion to her productions and selections, Manuka Honey circles club music's most compelling fringes. In just a few short years, she's cultivated an idiosyncratic sound that's shuttled her from continent to continent, assembling a tight catalog of EPs, remixes, and singles that harness the energy of Latin-American and Caribbean dance sounds, infusing it into radical new structures. A DJ, producer, multi-disciplinary artist, and professional astrologer, Marissa Malik was born and raised in the US before she relocated to London, bringing her hot, humid aura to rainy England. She's animated by the complex alchemy of the dancefloor, and is as likely to reference experimental sounds as she is cumbia or dembow.
agustine zegers
agustine zegers (b. 1994, Santiago) is an olfactory artist and student of atmospheric biopolitics. Their work attends to the nourishing and noxious transcorporealities we share as inhabitants of Earth, offering forms of communion with ecological collapse at the scale of the molecule and breath. Their work has scented and been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, 52 Walker, Center for Performance Research, Prairie, and Sharjah Art Foundation. They are currently based in Chicago.
Hsuan L. Hsu
Hsuan L. Hsu is the author of The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics (NYU, 2020), Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury, 2024), Olfactory Worldmaking (Minnesota, 2026), and (with Sal Nicolazzo) a long-form essay on ‘Candice Lin and Colonialism’s Promiscuous Materials’ (Andy Warhol Foundation, forthcoming). He is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis.
Harris Chowdhary
Harris Chowdhary is an artist, researcher, and writer interested in the feeling of possibility in globalisation. Trained in architecture and political economy, he works with discarded or found objects to examine how inherited structures (tools, media, roads, common sense) shape political and social life through coercion and control. His graduate work at MIT developed a speculative infrastructure for cross-border tourism in the Texas borderlands. His work has been shown at Ex Ovo (Dallas), Wiesner Gallery (Cambridge, MA), Lahore Biennale 01, and Centro ADM (Mexico City). He has presented at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, and the Asian American Writers Workshop, and his writing appears in the New York Review of Architecture and Document Journal.