SCENT

As a curator, I will keep putting scents ‘on sniff’ and raise awareness for the essential yet overlooked role smell has played in art and in history. Re-enacting historical synaesthetic experiments will help us understand how our ancestors perceived the world. This can be enabled by both presenting visual works of art, as well as the scents that inspired these works. Synaesthetic language will provide us with an excellent tool to bridge the gap between scent and its missing vocabulary.

My biggest aim, however, is to found a museum of lost smells. This would not just contain perfumes, but smells that were part of art history, cities, ancient Egyptian embalming practices (such as executed by Dora Goldsmith) and other olfactory heritage.

During Journey Through The Senses, our scent experts from around the world will offer workshops in which people learn how to smell more analytically, broaden their olfactory vocabulary, work with smell in museums and enlighten the ‘odience’ about the role of smell in history and the present. Synaesthesia will be one of the tools and topics of several events and exhibitions on the intersensorial relation between scent, music and visual art.