Caffé Signore Bach

Caffé Signore Bach, a video by Jesús Etxarte included in the colección olorVISUAL (Barcelona), is based on an anecdote concerning J.S. Bach. The German composer was commissioned to write a fantasy. To do so, he went off to a convent with the only company of his Neapolitan chef. A month later, the chef fell into a crisis due to an excess of beauty; the impossibility of digesting all that musical conversation led him to invent a caffé napoletano. In his video, Etxarte stages a twenty-minute conversation on how to prepare a good coffee. In its evocation of a scent as strong as a Neapolitan coffee’s, this piece clearly meets the artistic criteria of the colección olorVISUAL, whose common thread is smell and the capacity of a work of art to lead to recollection and to trigger olfactory memories.