Oceanic Refractions

Scent design for the immersive installation ‘Oceanic Refractions’, at Kuppelhalle, silent green, Berlin. A CTM Festival and transmediale collaboration, 26th Jan – 4th Feb 2024.

In 2025, Oceanic Refractions has been selected to be part of the inaugural Curators Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia and will be exhibited to close to 300,000 people, with an elevated architectural design, public programming and extensive catalogue of sound and images of Oceanian self-determination, sovereignty and ecological care.

We need your support to help get Oceanic Refractions to the 2025 Venice Biennale

Oceanic Refractions is an immersive and sensory audio-visual installation documenting Oceanian lifeworlds by artists Mere Nailatikau (Fiji) and AM Kanngieser (Australia/Germany), in collaboration with acclaimed filmmakers Laisiasa Dave Lavaki (Fiji), Tumeli Tuqota (Fiji), award winning musician Joseph Kamaru (Kenya/Germany), and smell artist Erin Adam (Australia). We are working with architecture and design Studio Folder (Italy) and Elise Misao Hunchuck (Canada/Germany) as our curator.

From years of careful listening and collaboration, Oceanic Refractions chronicles testimonials of Indigenous elders from Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Kiribati and their Oceanic communities who are bearing witness to ongoing and accelerating ecocide. Exquisite soundscape compositions surround you with 360-degree videography featuring the reefs of Fiji, the oceans and mangroves of Kiribati, the shorelines of Papua New Guinea, and the Marshall Islands; combined with custom designed kinetic seating and olfactory effects, the audience is immersed in a profound sensorial experience.

After sell out shows in Berlin for transmediale x CTM at the start of 2024, an exciting new iteration is underway for the Bienalle. This iteration will see a greater emphasis on scalable design, months of public programming and an extensive print and online catalogue.

Scaffolding the audio-visual worlds of the Oceanic Refractions installation, is a dedicated, long term community based project for which we are in the process of setting up a trust to distribute resources including funding, workshops and administrative support to experimental artists living in the Pacific region, where the arts are profoundly underfunded. Each exhibition of the work contributes to this trust.

About the Scent

In crafting the scent, we wanted a realistic representation of the Pacific Ocean, so I based my formula on notes of brine, seaweed in the sun, tropical storms, algae, and pollution.