Lion Wintersea / Hannah Marie Marcus. Citromancy.

Divination by fruit

Citromancy is a made up word: citrus, plus the suffix mancy used for forms of divination. The name says most of the work. It is a ritual for reading what is to come, but the tools are not cards or tea leaves. They are oranges, mandarins and pomelos that have been scented.

It was made by Hannah Marie Marcus, an artist working with scent, sound and performance, who signs this project as Lion Wintersea. The ritual has three parts that move together: divination by scent, a sound invocation, and an apocryphal tale, a story that wears the look of something ancient but belongs to no canon.

The preparation looks like a laboratory bench. Mandarin hybrids, small numbered flag picks, vials of scent, and syringes. Each fruit is injected through the peel with its own blend. From the outside nothing changes. Only when it is picked up, peeled or raised to the nose does the fruit speak. The numbers on the picks read like catalogue numbers in a collection, a small system only the performer fully holds. Participants see only a table of fruit, neatly arranged, waiting to be chosen.

Three nights in New York, one in Los Angeles

The ritual was performed three times at Olfactory Art Keller, a New York gallery devoted to olfactory art, in the winter of 2023: 14 January, 25 February and 18 March.

Each had its own theme. The February evening was a benefit for Direct Relief, built around the Damascus rose. The March evening fell close to the spring equinox. There the planets were represented by citrus, from large pomelos to small kumquats. A solar system laid out on a table, and it smelled.

The sound came from Wintersea Playboy, an ambient duo of Marcus and guitarist Olli Hirvonen. Marcus played processed accordion and fiddle, and sang. The music is not decoration. It is the invocation, the calling part of the rite.

In May 2023 Citromancy travelled to Reunion, an art space in Los Angeles, during Scent Week, with the Nose Garde collective. This time it added a divination deck, Maybe Lenormand, designed by Ryan Capogreco and enlarged into big cards. Scent and card were read together.

A reading to take home

Participants did not only watch. They received readings, and kept a divination poem. What they took home was words. What they left in the room was smell.

What stays with Citromancy is how it turns the role of fruit around. Citrus is so familiar it is almost invisible: in the kitchen, on the altar, in the gift basket. Orange peel is one of the easiest smells to name. Marcus takes that familiar thing and makes it strange. The fruit no longer smells only of itself. It carries another smell, placed there by someone else, and whoever holds it has to guess.

Divination here is not a promise about the future. It is a reason to sit down, smell slowly, and listen to a story no one knows to be true. An apocryphal tale, by definition, does not ask to be believed. It only asks to be heard.

In 2024 Citromancy was a finalist for the Sadakichi Award for experimental work with scent. Marcus has other projects that place scent inside the exchanges of daily life, such as Commodity Exchange. In Citromancy that system fits in the palm of a hand: one fruit and one question.