cologne
the BE WHAT YOU WANT C O LO G N E
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When travelling, I picked up a special rule: whatever toiletries find me, must be used. Usually, I imagine male companions I have not yet met, thoughtfully arranging trails of creams, soaps, colognes, underwear, balms and mysterious powders. I feel closest to these men’s touch, when I visit overgrown parks, public restrooms, department stores, cemeteries, swimming pools, hospitals, flower shops and churches. Like a blunt reminder that I live on borrowed time, the sensation of being touched by these men, from somewhere in my not so distant future, feels like a gentle warm breeze. If I remain in transit, the emerging plasticity prepares me to trade this world for a better place. Deciding in favour of neither the real nor reality, I articulate my journey as a construction held over this abyss, where the real remains invisible, or, to put it in terms of Wittgenstein’s categories: the real shows itself, and this showing is of the order of signalling the inexpressible.
Following in the footsteps of the local men I’ve written about while searching for pleasure in forgotten and decaying post-industrial sites, each morning before starting my 10-5 schedule at STRIDE, on my walk, I picked up unattended wild flowers and weeds that almost invisibly, and one could say, quietly - and in solitude, grow & spread through pavement cracks, or in back alleys, underneath parked cars, in between buildings, on rooftops or somewhere by the river, out of the way - similar, and I would like to imagine, in parallel to how some of us, strangers and travellers, need, and have to continuously seek + redefine & produce sentiments of pleasure and affection as our relationship to the surrounding environment continues to remain in constant movement. (Michel de Certeau / Practice of Everyday life 1985). Then, I borrowed from my mother’s, and grandmother’s recipes for improvised home-made cures so that I could extract their fragrance, and in the process, I created a limited edition cologne that comes from, and at the same time changes local architecture one splash at a time. Combined with strategically picked essential oils, the Be What You Want Cologne, can also be used as an intimate healing balm when activated by your body’s unique intimacy. Roll it on your skin, smell it, drop some in the bathtub - or simply carry the bottle in your backpack, like a companion that you’ve never met, but who will always be with you, and in you, as the fragrance - like inhaled air, enters, dissolves and settles in your stomach. Ask me for a sample.
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B O G D A N
v i d e o by A L E X / shot on his cell