pronunciation: /məˈtɪəriəl ˈselvɪdʒɪz/ noun (used with a singular verb)
1. A radio-making project examining materiality through Global Majority First Nations perspectives, with a focus on Southern and West Africa.
Etymology: From material + selvedges (plural of selvedge, also spelled selvage), from Middle English self + edge. The term performs deliberate wordplay with salvage (from Old French salvage, meaning "to save"), invoking both the textile concept of a self-finished fabric edge and the act of recovering suppressed knowledge systems.
“Nothing brings to life again a forgotten memory like fragrance."- Christopher Poindextes Research summary: Olfaction has privileged neural access to limbic structures (amygdala, hippocampus), making smells tightly coupled to emotion and autobiographical memory (the “Proust effect”). Scent design is increasingly used in museums, heritage work and environmental design to evoke place and memory, but reproducibility and ethics are contested.
Scent as a material: Olfactory practices in community-based knowledge traditions link plants, place, ritual, and kin. Scents are agents of belonging and of exclusion; they enact place-making through non-visual registers. Because odorant molecules materially interact with bodies and spaces, scent functions as a substrate of social and ecological relation.
Ideas we are curious to explore: 1. Methods and grammars for archiving olfactory elements as cultural heritage beyond recipe lists (i.e., practice-based, community-mediated scent archives). 2. The relationship between plant essences and healing.