The artist co-curated Peripheral Intuitions, a two-week-long program focused on the regenerative power of nightlife, and co-founded La Escuela del Olor, an artistic collective charting the olfactory landscape of the Caribbean.
Chaveli’s practice merges installations, scents, objects, paintings, interventions, and performative rituals enacted by people from her close personal life. Care, soft power, and ancestral Caribbean wisdom are used as starting points to offer a critical reflection on inherited colonial hierarchies through syncretic depictions that revert that which is considered holy, worthy, or significant. This intersensorial approach aims to highlight that emotions and knowledge are not mutually exclusive, while understanding their correlation as an active part of a decolonizing practice.
Through her scent-based works, Chaveli brings smells of the Caribbean into the exhibition arena. Smells rising directly from folk medicine are a key element of her practice which explores access to health and its symbiotic relationship with belief in Puerto Rican history.