A Lecture-Performance That Stinks
OLFAC
ifk Vienna
December 2025
Garlic’s notorious smell—on our breath and tables—has been historically weaponized by various dominator and colonial powers to other and oppress. Knoblauchfresser (or »garlic-eater«) is an enduring anti-Arab and anti-Semitic epithet, and a slur for migrating workers throughout Europe. Korean colonial subjects of the Japanese empire were stereotyped as garlic-smelling peasants. Brahmins in south India refuse garlic as impure and for the lower castes.
This lecture-performance interrogates the social power of olfaction and odor. It performatively suggests we reclaim not only the populist power of garlic but of smell in our nominal democracies, tasking all in attendance with smelling as an active engagement and sniffing out our reactions to what goes up our stinking noses. What can olfaction and odor provide as a lens (a nostril?) for interrogating our sociopolitical interactions? How and when do we abandon our fellow citizens and living things because of their odor? What do we risk by actually smelling each other, and how can encountering the dual nature of garlic’s odor—delicious when roasting, discomforting when exhaled—force us to reckon with legacies of bigotry and bias in honest and surprising ways? What stinks about our civic lives, and how could they smell more like Bärlauchsuppe? Join our expanding community of allium acolytes by smelling, eating, and planting garlic, all ways to contest this ugly history and reclaim garlic as a tool of resistance.
Conceived and Performed by Brandon Woolf, Matthew Korahais, and Leonie Bell
Special Thanks to:
Silke Felber, Julia Ostwald, Freda Fiala, Katharina Rahn, Stew Stewart, and Maxwell Flaum.