This Saturday, January 31, from 2 to 6 pm, we invite you to the pop-up exhibition and perfume launch of
@veronikadesova at
@sezonsofia
The project is part of the curatorial framework Reverberations of the Unseen of
@vvvladimirovv
fruit/vegetable is a pop-up exhibition featuring the eponymous editioned scented work alongside a new video work by Veronika Desova. At its core, the project synthesises the smell of a traditional fruit and vegetable shop. Once familiar and taken for granted, this smell is slowly becoming a relic, erased by global political and economic forces that privilege large supermarket chains over small, local vendors.
As food distribution is centralised and surplus redirected toward corporations able to offer lower prices through mass import, different labour standards, and looser regulatory frameworks, these neighbourhood shops, alongside their sensory ecosystems, are experiencing transformation. fruit/vegetable becomes a form of “scented archaeology,” preserving an endangered smell.
The perfume itself is a luxury object designed to stimulate desire. This introduces a deliberate contradiction. By bottling the scent of an increasingly inaccessible everyday space, the work points to how such fruit and vegetable shops have themselves become a form of luxury. Rare within the contemporary city, and increasingly priced for a more affluent social strata.
The accompanying video work shifts attention to the making of the perfume’s container. Evoking feelings that oscillate between attraction and repulsion, reflecting the perfume’s smell of freshness and decay. From this perspective, fruit/vegetable asks whether decay is not simply an end, but a necessary condition for renewal.
Veronika Desova is a Bulgarian and Scottish architect, teacher and conceptual artist currently based between New York and Sofia, Bulgaria. She works with ready-made architectural fragments, industrial design techniques, photography, scent and performance art to explore the phenomenological and socio-political relationship between architecture and the body.
The project is implemented with the financial support of the
@nationalculturefund 
