Our Scent Identity
What makes a stranger? / Pop-up Exhibition
Date: June 2024
Location: Venice, Italy (Art Biennale)
Discussion: How does smell influence our social interactions?
Can scent build trust between strangers?
Do cities have scents?
Future Ideas
What Makes a Stranger?
What makes someone 'foreign' to us?
What does their scent tell us about them?
Our olfactory (scent) identity refers to the unique scent of each individual. We register the scent of others subconsciously most of the time and react without being aware of what is leading us. It can influence first impressions, romantic attraction, and even the level of trust and comfort we feel around someone. But every scent of a friend was once that of someone 'foreign' to us.
So when does someone become our ‘olfactory kin’?
And can we fabricate this connection?
This Pop-up Exhibition wanted to explore these questions.
During the evening guests were invited to smell three ‘home’ scents. Familial scents without any description and choose one as their own, led by instinct alone.
Afterwards the group were left to interact amongst themselves. We observed that those who didn’t know each other previously were drawn into conversation with others who had chosen the same ‘home’ scent. Fabricating a new connection between them.
Why did they both choose this scent?
Does it build more trust when there is a familial scent as opposed to something foreign or unusual?
Going one step further, we also asked them to consider the idea that they may already have a familiar scent to one another. Our 'skin scent' is influenced by several factors but our diet, lifestyle and environment all contribute. And the majority of the guests that evening lived and worked in Venice.
Scent and our sense of smell informs us on so many levels about the world and the people around us. We are constantly responding to smells.
All of our responses are learned however. We learn the smell of a comforting place and we respond with heightened alert to a new smell landscape.
So how can this be utilised to build trust, create safety and cross barriers?
We will explore this in our next pop-up exhibition.
The Smell Of Fear
Olfactory Story Telling / Workshops
Location: Oxford Story Telling Museum
Discussion: What is the smell of fear? How scent can enrich our communication
How are scent associations created?
Olfactory Story Telling
A story telling game that gives children the opportunity to choose and create ‘the smell of happiness or the stench of fear’. The addition of scent to their stories encourages children to think about different emotions in a new light and communicate them with their friends using
a novel medium.
The workshop was structured around a custom made story. Within the chapters each group were given certain emotions; pride, jealousy, happiness, fear etc. from which they were asked to create 'scents'.
The discussions within the groups were equally as important to the end result.
There is no such thing as a good or bad smell when we are born. So all of our associations come through learned experiences. In this instance, it was particularly interesting to explore with children there uninhibited scent associations with some of our more complex human emotions.
Acqua Granda
The scent of the tides/ Research
Location: Venice
Discussion: How does the tidal nature of Venice effect us?
Olfactory Memories from 2019
A collective memory: olfactory edition
Acqua Granda:
A digital community memory is a digital information resource that is created by a community for the community itself. It is inspired by a human memory, which contains a huge set of facts, images, sounds, smells, bodily experiences, beliefs, commentaries, opinions, speculations, plans, emotions, perspectives and much more. Our memory is crucial to give us a sense and purpose and to deal with new experiences based on what we learned from the past. A digital community memory aspires to do the same, except that it is not the memory of a single person but of a group of people who have common concerns.
As part of this collection I was asked to provide the olfactory representations of low tide and high tide, at their extremes. We also used these scents as cues to bring forward other more personal scent memories associated with the high waters of 2019.
For the installation I used reclaimed wood from a local Forcolaio (Gondola Oar Craftsman). The wood itself is another key element of Venice and the scent was sprayed onto reclaimed Venetian Tiles.
The height of the wood reflected the tidal waves.
