Library of Ancestral Knowledge: Scent, Fragment and Memory

This creative workshop is reserved for ESEA diaspora people.

“Scent arrives before language.
A trace in the air.
A whisper in the body.
Something half-remembered, something never forgotten.” — Duong

Join resident artist Duong Thuy Nguyen in a participatory workshop that explores the intimate relationship between scent, memory, and ancestral presence – especially within diasporic experience. Rooted in the Vietnamese tradition of Trầm Hương – a sacred incense made from agarwood – this gathering invites participants to reflect on how scent can become an archive: of memories, of absence, of return.

Scent lingers in ways that stories do not. It slips past the mind and settles in the body. The scent of old wood, of altar smoke, of your grandmother’s coat. What does it mean to follow scent as a method for remembering? What histories surface when you breathe deeply, without rushing to explain?

Through a series of guided activities – including scent-mapping, incense blending, and reflective writing or recording – you’ll be invited to engage your senses as tools for memory.

Together, we will:

• Trace personal and collective memories through smell Blend our own incense as devotional offerings
• Record reflections and scent-memories for the Library of Ancestral Knowledge
• Explore the role of sensory experience in cultural continuity and healing

Please note this is not a lecture or a performance. It is a space for slow, attentiveness. A room where the invisible becomes felt. Where fragments are enough. Where the smoke of one person’s memory might touch another’s.

This workshop is especially for those who move between cultures, between geographies. For those who feel distant from their ancestors, but still light incense for them. For those who remember in pieces. For those who carry grief they cannot name, and joy they cannot place.

Bring with you:

• A story, a photograph, an object, or simply a memory – intact or broken.
• We will bring scent, stillness, and space.

Let us remember together.
Not through the head, but through the breath.
Not through explanation, but through presence.