The Drop
ALT(R) is activated through an intimate exchange. Visitors are invited to receive the perfume in return for a single admission: “What’s something you wish you’d said or had the opportunity to say?” These unspoken truths— written on seed paper—will become an anonymous, living archive of longing.
The exchange is a seated experience, facilitated low to the ground over a humble tea table. On the table is a monkey pod serveware set which, when stacked, resembles a lotus flower in bloom. This set—commissioned by Hawaiian vendors for a tourist market and hand-carved by Indigenous communities in the Philippines using wood native to Central and South America—embodies the through line of Indigenous labor and intercontinental trade networks that lent mid-century modernism its ‘global’ aura.
At first glance, the set appears as an artifact of mid-century exoticism. Yet within its form is a telling of the entwined histories of extraction and artistry: forests felled and reshaped by hand, local craft translated into mass-produced souvenirs, and Indigenous knowledge rebranded as “world design.” The piece is both ornamental and infrastructural, a quiet reminder that the modernist showroom was dependent on unseen hands working across oceans. Its arrangement alludes not only to a symbol of spiritual unfolding, but also a structure of nested economies—colonial trade routes, labor migration, and the commodification of cultural forms—that persist in the circulation of objects today.
Here, the serveware is reclaimed from its status as a tourist commodity and reframed as an emblem of Indigenous presence within global design history. It signals how craft, even under the pressures of colonial trade, safeguarded cultural techniques, aesthetics, and relationships to material. The perfume—an alchemy of natural resins, oils, and absolutes—extends the tensions of this lineage, carrying forward legacies of extraction and a knowledge of how materials can hold memory, alter perception, and create relation. In the act of collecting truths with the intention of cultivating life, the work acknowledges these continuities—repositioning mass-circulated symbols of service and luxury into sites of encounter, care, and reciprocity.
Photography by Chris Reising.