If you missed part 1, and/or have no idea what Headspace is, see here. Part 2 is about 75 minutes long, and there’s a brief synopsis below the jump.
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If There Ever Was… a book of extinct and impossible smells, by Robert Blackson ~ perfume books
What does communism smell like? How about the Sun, or Cleopatra’s perfume, or the atomic blast that destroyed the city of Hiroshima? This booklet, published on the occasion of the exhibition If There Ever Was, attempts to bring distant, elusive, and sometimes impossible olfactory experiences to life. Curator Robert Blackson commissioned thirteen fragrances from eleven perfumers and smell artists, including Bertrand Duchaufour, Christophe Laudamiel, Christoph Hornetz, Mark Buxton, Sissel Tolaas, and Geza Schön. If, like me, you missed the show at the Reg Vardy Gallery, this booklet gives you a chance to smell them all in the comfort of your own home.
Each scent of the exhibition is encapsulated in a scratch-n-sniff card, and comes with a short explanatory text. What these fragrances have in common is that they all refer to objects that are absent from our experience: they represent things that are temporally and/or spatially remote. There are no traces, for instance, of the original recipe to Cleopatra’s perfume; we can only guess what it really smelled like…
If There Ever Was ~ an exhibition of extinct and impossible smells
The Reg Vardy Gallery at the University of Sunderland, Tyne & Wear, England, will host If There Ever Was: an exhibition of extinct and impossible smells:
In his book of essays entitled, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the physician Lewis Thomas wrote, “The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking itself.” And it is with this appreciation of smell as comparable to thought and interpretation that the exhibition If There Ever Was considers scent as integral to the perception of abstraction and representation…
The scent of fear, the scent of apples
EVEN BEFORE the bottles in the box marked “fear” are opened, it is possible to smell a small heavy cloud percolating the air: musky, sweet and acrid. In a tiny laboratory in Berlin, Sissel Tolaas, smell provocateur and fragrance developer, is sorting through the concentrated containers of sweat scent she has collected from 16 men from all over the world, and all in a state of fear. She wafts the neck of one bottle in front of my nose. The odour catches me at the back of my throat. Tolaas herself coughs and pulls back.
— From WHY IT'S GOOD TO SMELL: The woman who turned body odour into an art form, a must-read article in the Sunday Herald…
