Karolina Grzywnowicz

In recent years, the Polish-Belarusian border has become the stage of a multilayered socio-political conflict. As a frontier of the European Union, a contact zone between East and West, and a locus of escalating geopolitical tensions, it has been transformed into a space of violence, repression, and resistance. Migrants from West Asia and Africa reach this border, treating it as a new route into Europe. The institutions of the Polish state, meanwhile, demonstrate their determination to defend the impenetrability of the EU’s borders, turning the area into a closed militarized zone.

Based on the recollections of people who have crossed the Polish-Belarusian border, and in collaboration with local residents and human rights activists, the artist synthetically reconstructs — in laboratory conditions — the smell of the move. After many weeks on the move, refugees’ bodies develop a characteristic odor — the smell of “bare life”. It is not the smell of individual people, but of the condition they have been forced into — a product of extreme survival circumstances: dirt, soaked clothing, chronic fear, and exhaustion.

Hiding from the eyes of soldiers and border guards in the dense forests of Białowieża — a primeval woodland spanning both the Polish and Belarusian sides — refugees are often tracked down by specially trained border patrol dogs, guided primarily by scent. It is then that they are subjected to the most traumatizing forms of violence: beatings, dog attacks, pushbacks. This odor haunts them long after the journey ends, triggering flashbacks, anxiety, and panic attacks.

In collaboration with Professor Pamela Dalton of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia — a pioneer in the study of trauma-related odors, including the scent of 9/11 — the artist has carried out a process of synthetic reconstruction of this smell of the move. The resulting composition serves as the foundation for a scent installation: an olfactory archive of border violence.

And yet, the smell of the move also holds the potential to become something radically different — a new, powerful therapeutic tool, made accessible to both people on the move and activists who accompany them. When applied carefully in PTSD therapy, in low concentrations and under safe conditions, the scent can be detached from its fixed associations with danger or humiliation and redirected toward new ones. The repetitive cycle of trauma is disrupted and neutralized. Its dark origins cease to dominate, and instead contribute to the restoration of agency over one’s own senses.

The olfactory installation is accompanied by the film. It precisely documents, step by step, the training of a border service dog. The dog is taught to identify the smell of the move based on the clothing of refugees crossing the Polish-Belarusian border — and then, through a carefully reversed procedure, it is trained to stop responding to that same stimulus. The film serves as a near-instructional demonstration of the plasticity of the perceptual system, and more broadly, of the everyday ideological training to which societies are subjected. When the senses are subordinated to policies of repression and selection, they easily become tools for constructing a criminal, exclusionary consensus.

The Desensitization project refers to what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics — a form of governance that manages not life, but death. Borders become spaces where states intentionally maintain inhuman conditions: offering no shelter, yet not allowing people to “officially” die. In this sense, migration policy ceases to function as a system of protection and instead becomes a system of brutal segregation.

What is at stake in Grzywnowicz’s project is not only the exposure of mechanisms of violence, but also the attempt to create the conditions and tools to counter them. It is a threefold act of resistance:
1. it builds a scent archive of exclusion and reveals the sensory dimension of political repression;
2. it demonstrates the techniques used to manipulate the senses in ways that legitimize violence at the borders;
3. it constructs an olfactory tool for trauma healing.
In a place where politics has turned people into traces to be erased, the artist proposes scent as a lasting, indelible proof of existence, and a means of resistance.