In my search I discovered Sissel Tolaas, an odor or scent artist. I found her work interesting and inspiring, and wanted to learn more. I found an interview where she explains her vision on the future.
Following Her Nose
An Odor Artist's Vision of a Smelly Future
Odor expert and smell artist Sissel Tolaas straddles the worlds of art, science and commerce. She believes that humans are not reaching their olfactory potential and that we need to get rid of the notions of good and bad smells.
Sissel Tolaas is difficult to label. She's an artist, chemist, odor theorist and smell missionary. Now she can add "magazine curator" to her CV. The current issue of MONO.KULTUR, an arts quarterly published in Berlin, features 12 of the scents she has produced in her Berlin lab. All you need to do is scratch and sniff.
The Scandinavian smell expert, who has degrees in chemistry, art and language, is on something of a mission to change the way we think about our olfactory capabilities. She argues that an appreciation of our sense of smell can allow us to live our lives to their full potential. "We can be nothing without the nose," she told SPIEGEL ONLINE in an interview. "The moment we stop breathing we are dead. With every breath we take in thousands of molecules."
For 20 years, the Norwegian-born Tolaas has been engaged in researching odors, collecting an archive of some 6,700 smells in her West Berlin apartment and training her nose to not just detect scents but to remove her emotional baggage about notions of odors being good or bad. Her interdisciplinary research and conceptual approach has led her to put on art installations, work with universities on research projects and put her knowledge to commercial use.
Tolaas argues that our sense of smell is "completely undervalued" compared to other senses. We rarely understand the information that comes through our noses, she says, and we lack the language to describe what we experience. Yet the very way we relate to our surroundings and each other can be primarily through smell. "Tolerance doesn't start with looking and hearing, with skin color or religion but with the smell, the nose," she argues.
'Smell Occurs in an Emotional Context'
Tolaas is working with young people to redress the sorry state of our smell consciousness. For seven years she has been "investing in the future" by tackling children's preconceived ideas of good and bad smells. "I take kids to hardcore neighborhoods where it's very pungent and the kids freak out," she explains enthusiastically. She then reproduces the smells in her lab and reexposes the children to them. On day one they are disgusted but slowly they get used to the whiff. By day five, they have learned to like the once-strange odor.
"We are not born to like and dislike things," she explains. "Every smell occurs in an emotional context and you have to have an experience to react to the smell."
There is, however, one smell she admits that is universally regarded as bad: the smell of death. But even that didn't turn off Tolaas, who spent years training herself to be neutral about smells -- her personal dislike had been for sour milk -- and not to react to them emotionally. The German Museum of Military History in Dresden set her the task of recreating the stench of the battlefield and she rose to the challenge. "They wanted the smell of dead bodies and blood and I tried with the tools I have, although I thought to myself: How far do I go, where do I stop?" When she presented the museum with her scent, however, they quickly went off the idea.
Though she doesn't have a gallery or consider herself part of the art world, Tolaas has made a name for herself as an artist. "I am interested in action and reaction, in the process of being alive and I needed to get out of the lab situation," she explains. She chose art as a way to communicate her ideas, because that was the most likely world to accept her "crazy project."
In 2004, for example, Tolaas presented an art project on her adopted city of Berlin, where she has lived since 1987. She went to four very different districts -- Reinickendorf, Neukölln, Charlottenburg and Mitte -- and walked around, identifying the neighborhoods with her "professional nose." She then reproduced the smells in her lab and returned to the areas to confront the local people with the odors and asked them to speak about them. "They just let loose like children, speaking about the smells and telling me stories. It went beyond what any kind of visual material or sound could have allowed." These reactions then became part of an installation which was shown during the third Berlin Biennale art exhibition.
Personal Smells Like Finger Prints
Tolaas's success in the field of art in turn prompted the commercial world to come knocking on her door. The International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF) company now sponsors her and has provided her with equipment and 2,000 molecules to work with in her lab. "This for me is heaven," she says. "It changed my life." Yet Tolaas doesn't produce perfumes. "I have nothing against perfumery or deodorization, but we have to know what we are covering up before we deodorize it." Everyone has a unique smell she says, like a finger print, and that smell interacts with any perfume that is applied.
Tolaas has also worked with academia. She exhibited a show on the smell of fear at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 and has worked with a Harvard University research team on assessing sources of pollution in Mexico City. She developed methods to engage with people in the city and their awareness of the causes of pollution. "If you get the message through your nose, you really get the message," she argues.
At the moment she is working with sports giant Adidas on developing the company's corporate identity and has projects in the works with the American cities of San Francisco and Kansas City. "I am really busy," she says with relish.
Tolaas is positively evangelical in her striving to improve our olfactory skills. "There is so much out there that we don't know about the nose. What would happen if we started to train the nose for other purposes than just breathing in and out?"
Yet her work is almost always playful and full of humor. "It's all about getting humanity to become kids again," Tolaas says. "As far as the nose is concerned, we are all babies, we haven't got a clue. I give you the playground and let you run loose."
Tolaas has graduate degrees in chemistry, art and language, plus an undergraduate degree in math, began working with smell after chemicals she was using for an art project blew up in a particularly stinky way. "I realized we have only two words to communicate about smells: bad or good," she says. "I thought, something is wrong with that."
Tolaas traveled the world collecting odors, building a library of 6,763 scents, including dirt, toys, and rotten bananas. Ultimately, her reputation led her to the perfume industry. Tolaas' collaboration with IFF allows her to concentrate on scent 24/7. In return, the company gets her maverick sensibility, which may lead it to untapped markets. Tolaas has also worked with companies like Ikea and Volvo to add a scent to their brands. This could mean that in the future we'll know a company not just by its logo or jingle, but also by its smell.
For her MIT show, Tolaas synthetically rendered each man's unique scent. Then, using IFF's industrial micro encapsulation process (today's answer to scratch-and-sniff), she created a special paint. When visitors touched the exhibit walls, microscopic capsules broke, releasing scents into the air. S&M Guy and Guy No. 3 were derived from the sweat of two of the nine men who were the subject of Tolaas' 2006 exhibit the FEAR of Smell — the Smell of FEAR at MIT's List Visual Arts Center. The men suffer from acute, chronic fear. To capture the smell of their sweat, Tolaas, the world's preeminent odor artist, designed a small device that subjects placed in their armpits when they were likely to be afraid. The S&M guy, for instance, collected his perspiration when he visited sex clubs. He and the other men mailed their samples to Tolaas' lab, which is funded by International Flavors and Fragrances, a $4 billion company that makes perfumes for Prada and Calvin Klein.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten