Moving Scents: Choreographies Amid the Racial Capitalocene

It has frequently been noted that climate change is a phenomenon that largely exceeds sensory perception (Horn, Neimanis). In this light, the performing arts seem uniquely capable of generating sensorial experiences that provoke affective engagement, challenge epistemic regimes, and invite imagining otherwise. Yet, as I argue, their aesthetic means also risk becoming implicated in the imprints of the racial Capitalocene.

The talk draws on Faye Driscoll’s choreography Weathering (2023), which stages an intense maelstrom of motions and scents amid late capitalist excess or collapse. In doing so, the performance generates a contradictory field of sensorial perception — at once an escape from the Capitalocene’s violence and subtly entangled with its exploitation of the senses.

By situating the performance alongside early modern pageantry in London in the context of the spice trade, the talk explores a particular complicity of smell in the kinetics of modernity. These pageants exemplify how motion — fundamentally tied to modernity and its capitalist-colonial foundations as a form of choreopower (Egert) — intersects with olfaction and what I term olfactopower. Against this backdrop, the talk faces the ambiguous sensorial entanglements of today’s choreographies concerned with the climate catastrophe.

About the speaker

Julia Ostwald is a dance scholar and postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project OLFAC at the University of Arts Linz (Austria). Situated at the intersections of dance and performance studies, sensory studies, and cultural history, her research currently focuses on olfactory choreographies in the context of the racial Capitalocene.

Julia held positions at the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the University of Vienna, and Salzburg University, from where she also earned her doctorate in dance studies. She holds an MA in Dance Studies from Free University Berlin and a BA in Dance Teaching from the Academy of the Arts Tilburg (NL).

Her most recent publications include the monograph Choreophonien. Konstellationen von Stimme und Körper im Tanz der Moderne und der Gegenwart (transcript 2024) on the micropolitics of choreographing voice and body, and the forthcoming article “Choreographing Magnetism. The Performance of Knowledge in the Ethereal Field of Invisible Forces”, in Performing Magnetism in the Long Nineteenth Century: Transnational Perspectives, ed. by Kurt Vanhoutte et al (Leuven UP 2026).