Chaveli Sifre

Coconut Bombs

Coconuts, water-based tinctures, Puerto Rican herbs, rum, chloroform

“These objects are playing with colonial archetypes. ‘Coconut Bombs’ are inaccessible perfume-type tinctures composed of local healing herbs and chloroform. It takes on ideas of paradise and comfort that are used to promote the Caribbean as a place for leisure and pleasure while ignoring the inherently poisonous environment consequent to its political ambiguity. The coconut bomb, both an object of beauty and a threat, lies innocently on the exhibition floor, waiting for a kick.” — Chaveli Sifre

About the artist

Chaveli Sifre

Chaveli Sifre is a Puerto Rican artist based in Berlin. Chaveli’s work centers on healing practices, the sense of smell, botany, and the belief systems constructed around them. Interested in intersensorial entanglement as knowledge production, she creates installations, scents, paintings, and performative rituals that recover the long-lost intersections between science, spirituality, perfumery, medicine, magic, and care.

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.