Microbes are intensely social, communicating and cooperating to perform a wide range of multicellular activities. Social behaviours are mediated by intercellular chemical signaling and surface sensitivity. These are environments where contact zones are physical; vision is irrelevant, touch is all. Bodies brush against each other and their surrounds, animated by chemical transmissions and transfigured by sensation. Communications are visceral: chemical signals excreted and caressed by cell surface moieties. The caress of volatile organic compounds (odorants) on the membranes of cells is known as olfaction and odorants secreted by microbes are fundamental within metabolic processes. Matter forms and dissolves as odorants are ingested, digested and excreted. This paper weaves together Barad’s concept of queer performativity, Hauser & Strecker’s (2020) microperformativity, Landecker (2011; 2023), Hird (2012) and Bakke’s (2017) understandings of metabolism as transformative matter, and Irigaray’s eros (1993) to examine artworks that engage with olfaction and microbes, arguing through these olfactory performances, microbes and humans become sense-able to and of each other, an erotic inter and intra-species communication, a queer metabolic intra-activity that transverses spacetimematter.