Olfactory Pathways to Black Country Futures

The chapter shares three vignettes from the Black Country, Fighting Gravity, Weightless Mass and Life’s Allotment that describe embodied practices with the potential to disclose alternative ways of experiencing being. Within the everyday, senses reflect and realise an intuitive flow of time and experience. Smells offer an olfactory pathway that simultaneously anticipates future states, evokes a recalling of a summoned past and attends to, immerses, and transcends a rich but transient present. Such olfactory pathways are part of a poetic praxis where meaning and value is not just derived from the ability to act in the world but from the opportunities to unconceal and experience what it can mean to be and dwell within the shared worlds of the Black Country.