Cagáňová Michaela

☁️SCENT IS PRESENT: Publication PRE-ORDER ☁️ Smell resists notation, classification, and above all, capture. Every being has a specific scent, yet scent belongs to nothing and no one. What does it mean to write about something that so clearly defies the structure of a sentence, a paragraph or even a word? Writing about scent might sound contradictory, yet that contradiction is precisely where this publication begins. Scent is Present is an experimental publication exploring the ephemeral notion of olfaction. Through essays, exercises, and artistic contributions, it challenges the limits of language, inviting readers to engage with scent as a non-linear, sensory, and embodied phenomenon. Contributors including olfactory artists, scent designers, and sound artists share their practices and reflections that foreground smell in political and ecological contexts. With active scent exercises throughout the publication such as scent walks, writing prompts, and multisensory experiments, the publication explores and questions engagement with odours, and how odours affect our memories and environment. Scent is Present positions scent as political, while being also subjective and personal. The publication stems from a workshop by the same name, carried out in @petrohradska_kolektiv in the summer of 2025 by @sleepy.press and @michaela_cagan . The workshop accompanied @holo_s_ exhibition ‘AUTOCHORA’ at @jednadvatrigallery . HOW TO ORDER? DM - @michaela_cagan with a chosen price and your address (physical pick-up possible Lisbon, Bratislava, Amsterdam) Price sliding scale 💶 18 eur - Covers the costs 22 eur - Covers also some fee of the creators 26 eur - Supports independent collectives /If you are really interested in the publication and truly cannot afford it, message us! Design: @supermarketkovitost & @kml_vls Workshop participants: Magdalena Škerenčák, @nelacaramela , @eva.fajcikova , @st.feral , Jasmína Horváthová, @karokuc , Dunja, Varya Starodubova, @ondrejtrhon , sof, Gabriele Sláma, Kristýna Šuleková, Iman, K, Lucy, Maëlle Magnin-Feysot Other contributors: @_romans.kaa_ , @lilatesla_ , @oh.so.many.narratives , @lilatesla_ , @m.iliv .

In case you missed our artist statement and recent works in Secondary archive, link in bio! And dont forget to check out other women artist from CEE and EE! Thank you for the opportunity @katarzynakozyrafoundation

Mohou být vůně a pachy použity jako nástroj vyprávění příběhů? 👃 Sociologie a politika vůní jsou neprozkoumaným tématem, a ani vůně nemohou uniknout striktním nálepkám a genderovým stereotypům. Pro holo- ale pachy primárně reprezentují mezidruhovost a více-než-lidské vnímání. 🚏Zastávka 04 s @holo_s_ od Nikoly Brabcové na webu!

💧 New edition of Villa Karpatia opens already upcoming Fridat at 19:00 at @maisunomaisum 💧 Hosted by Lena Ruzhytska and Jenya Ponomarov (UA), Payment Pending transforms historical air raid alert data from Ukraine into a continuous stream of printed receipts. 🧾 Each slip of the check-writing machine records the start and end of a real air raid alert in Ukraine — moments drawn directly from lived data during Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion. Instead of monetary transactions, the device calculates time spent in interruption: minutes and hours redirected into shelters, waiting, enduring terror, and uncertainty. The machine converts this duration into an accumulating “cost,” registering time that can never be recovered. A digital display continuously updates this total, adding each printed interval to reveal the growing collective toll of sheltering. Even in moments without sirens, a certain tension remains. The anticipation of interruption never fully disappears, amplified by unsettling drones between alerts. The exhibition is situated within a metro station, further emphasizing how underground spaces in Ukraine function both as transit hubs and shelters during air raids. Payment Pending reflects on stolen time and how war occupies attention, imposing a permanent state of anticipation. The resulting balance can never truly be settled. 🕊️

Exploring new porous vessels for scents & Working on some new pieces with @kml_vls . While physically apart, mentally together 🦾

🌅 📑Madrugada para oito tells the story of one person’s experience with the Portuguese tax office through a series of drawings. They originated during a sleepless night spent waiting in line for a NIF (taxpayer identification number), which only eight people receive each day in Barreiro. In order to be one of the lucky eight receivers, Alena had to arrive at the office at 10 in the evening, and wait in line until sunrise, when the office opened. Even today, new people still come in the evening and sleep outside the office in the hope of receiving their NIF number. Alena initially hoped to create site-specific benches to help migrants spend their night more comfortably. However, the original office closed, and she found its remnants in the form of the large boards covered in faded blue fabric, once used to separate employees of Finanças. Boards that now carry the exhibited drawings. Amid layers of dust, small scenes appear, moments where a person’s life meets a confusing system that repeats the same absurd tasks every day. Each night, the system leaves people waiting outside, drifting between watching and dreaming of sunrise and their nine-digit number. At Villa Karpatia, the boards become witnesses to events, a recording archive and a sketchbook of scenes from bureaucratic life, serving as panel-altars or stations along the calvary of administrative orders and duties. See u this Friday at 7 again at @maisunomaisum ! 🦾

Re:SEE U SOON” is a digital letter exchange between two Eastern European women, each based in a different country, stretched out along two different coastlines. Lucia Holásková, writer and publisher based in Amsterdam, and Michaela Cagáňová, a transdisciplinary glass artist newly settled in Lisbon. Both grew up alongside the myth of the better life in the West; a promise of freedom and self-fulfillment. Yet, that myth quickly revealed its fractures. The distance that was once meant to liberate has also blurred the sense of home into something spectral, portable, and ambivalent.  Michaela and Lucia are interested in exploring what it means to belong elsewhere, and nowhere, to notice how new forms of attachment, taste and smell are made in motion. Can writing become a kind of home? How does distance both estrange and sustain attachment?  By sharing their daily observations and thoughts, book notes, recipes or even mundane burdens of being cultural workers, they are interested in exploring letter writing as a form of archiving. Until they “see each other soon,” probably back in Slovakia, visiting their families around Christmas.  Subscribe via substack😙

Sitting on a bus to Évora, welcoming spring with the past bits of Slovak winter.

ℝ𝕖: 𝕊𝔼𝔼 𝕌 𝕊𝕆𝕆ℕ : 𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕕𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕞𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕡𝕚𝕝𝕖 Prečítajte si Substack článok o Kope snenia od Michaely Cagáňovej, spoluautorky výstavy. Celý článok nájdete na Substacku - Re: SEE U SOON Výstavu si môžete pozrieť do 20. 3. 2026 15:00 - 18:00, Po - Pia v Galérii Tabačka. Autorstvo: Michaela Cagáňová, Jakub Juhás Kurátorka: Zuzana Janečková Tím: Samuel Velebný, Robert Bernáth, Dominika Moravčíková, Zuzana Pitková, Lucia Janšová Autorstvo textov na vankúšoch: Bolka, Viktória Citráková, András Cséfalvay, Mila Haugová, Michal Tallo, Danka Tomečková Hudba: Martin Burlas Poďakovanie: všetkým, ktorí darovali alebo zapožičali vankúše a periny, Botanickej záhrade UPJŠ Košice za drevo Z verejných zdrojov podporil Fond na podporu umenia.

Already this Friday, the 20th at 18:00, we are opening the exhibition M.L.D.S. (Multidimensional Leak Detection System) by Lisbon based visual artist Márton Tóth @marutonkun The opening takes place at @maisunomaisum (Picoas metro) and will be accompanied by @drub1ei dj set. With this event, we are launching a series of experimental, Eastern-European-vibed events organized by Villa Karpatia. See u there xx M.L.D.S., or Multidimensional Leak Detection System may be a tool like a scanner or a camera, capable of capturing different layers and dimensions of space and revealing artefacts that flow from one layer to another, from one dimension into the next. M.L.D.S. serves to unearth and excavate through these layers, opening onto realities that feel both alien and intimate. Scale is no longer linear or stable, but fluid and elastic, overlapping spaces that feel cosmic and microscopic at the same time. It feels as though this mode of capture engages with spatial layers that human senses alone cannot recognize, and that can only be registered through this kind of special device, a detection system. Images evoke a sense of leaking, which can work as a connective substance stretching across and linking different realms, surfaces and spatio-temporalities. What emerges may be a new reality, or rather a superimposition of multiple possible realities layered over one another. The exhibition takes place in an underground passage leading to the metro, embracing its liminal nature and weathered conditions. M.L.D.S. is a form of contemporary digital escapism. Daydreaming an alternative, filtered reality while traversing the multitude of environments one passes day to day.

Curating, managing, and designing treatments: Jakub Juhás (@___mappa ), Michaela Cagáňová (@michaela_cagan ), Zoltán Czakó Location: Lisbon Contact zone for potential collaborations: [email protected]

💧Villa Karpatia💧is a curatorial program spotlighting Eastern European artists and experimental practices. Hidden beneath the guise of a typical Carpathian (bathing) villa, it seeks to shelter the Eastern European community and those curious about it. It is a place to meet, to macerate ourselves in warm pools of exhibitions, visual and sound interventions, self-publishing projects and much more. Villa Karpatia has no fixed foundations—it can appear in different forms and in unexpected locations. Its operation will be handled by the curatorial team—our very own non-nuclear family of misfits: Jakub Juhás, (@___mappa )Michaela Cagáňová (@michaela_cagan ) and Zoltán Czakó. In the coming months, Villa Karpatia will pop up irregularly across Lisbon. All you need to do is stay alert, follow the steam signals, and be in the right place at the right time. Just stay tuned.