Šárka Koudelová, Petrichor at PRÁM, Prague.

Petrichor by Šárka Koudelová, curated by Edita Malina and Světlana Malina, at PRÁM, Prague, 6/11/2024 – 26/11/2024.

Exhibition text:
A scent that is layered, sedimented, timeless. A reminder of long-buried processes, of imprints that live within stones and continue to breathe. The earth’s skeleton, a solid space, a mineral shell capable of cradling all that is fragile. But also one that can release, allow escape or entry. An osmosis between the body of the stone and what seeps into it and out of it. A chain reaction ignition, an activation, a living memory of salt. Minerals, lying still, passive and prepared, awakened by the first touch of water, the first millimeter of rain, which permeates all—stone, salt, earth.

In this interaction, a familiar scent opens up, so faint in the air that we rarely sense it, yet it activates our most primal senses. Receptors in our own bony shell, our bodies that arise from the same minerals, salts, and smells. Petrichor is the earth opening its mouth in confession of presence. This ancient, indigestible scent is a speech without words, a message that earth, stone, salt remain in the end always active, always awake, always present.

Petrichor—the word itself feels too pure for what it describes, a pristine shell wrapped around the raw pulse of sensation. It is the fragrance of soil‘s slow exhale, the warm whisper of stones awakened by rain. It is the smell of earth coming alive, of dreams forged from dust, of ancient history imprinted in stone, slipping into the air we swallow.

This smell, this ancient wet musk, rises like something almost alive, almost aware, and yet, like all that is earthly, carried through layers of geological timelessness. There is the memory of things older than thought—a code embedded not in DNA but in the very stone bones of our world, some echo from the universe‘s own original rains, the first waters that touched virgin rock and filled the blankness with purpose.

Petrichor spreads through these layers, a reminder that the earth—so often unresponsive to our senses—is a living body, breathing and simmering below us in ways too slow, too subtle for our eyes. Petrichor is a reaction that awakens the memory of salt, setting off a chain older than memory itself. Minerals lie still, passive, waiting, and then come alive at the first touch of rain, the silent touch of a storm. In osmosis, stone mixes with soil, salt with steam. It is the language of the earth. Not in words we understand, nor in symbols we might grasp, but in a language of sensation, something almost comprehensible.

It is the olfactory murmur of a world we cannot fully see, an opening, a portal into hidden sensitivities—a fleeting, atmospheric bridge to the realization that we are not only on the earth but from itself.