Sensory landscapes and scent spatialisations: Investigating the effects of creative olfactory interventions on space and place
By Kate Alexandra / Issue 1 / November 14, 2024
The term 'smellscape' was coined in 1985 to describe the way that 'smells may be spatially ordered or place-related', which should be 'non-continuous, fragmentary in space and episodic in time and limited by the height of our noses from the ground, where smells tend to linger.' This concept of our surroundings being enmeshed with our perception of scent suggests that it is necessary to interrogate how practitioners utilise scent to impact and demarcate space. It is important to clarify what is meant by 'olfactory intervention'. I will use the term to refer to an intentional practice enacted by an individual or group using scent to create an effect on an environment of any kind. By isolating outcomes such as community engagement, artistic expression, and cultural or political criticism, we can attempt to accumulate and critically engage with the results of these olfactory interventions on space and place.
Exploring exteriors:
Olfactory interventions that occur in external environments – cities, fields, forests, bodies of water and so on – are all sensory landscapes that are primarily public or are subject to change due to their exposure to humans, animals and other natural forces. To focus on cities specifically, they are rife with smells that are wholly uncontrollable and yet pervasive: the 'smellscape is in constant flux and ephemeral, volatile smells are easy to ignore when experienced by ordinary people in everyday, urban environments.'
Kate McLean, a researcher based in Kent, has developed qualitative methods for understanding the olfactory landscape, particularly of cities. Her practice sits at the intersection between sensorial experience and cartographic strategies. With a background in graphic communication, she builds upon cultural geographic terminology alongside theoretical approaches such as 'scented cybercartography' to create a new research practice. It incorporates psychogeographical elements of walking, olfactory engagement and experimental cartography to create a range of maps that attempt to track, interpret and archive the smells contained in both rural and urban environments.
Her 2011 project 'New York's Smelliest Blocks' was inspired by an article in New York Magazine published months earlier in which two 'scent experts' accompanied journalist Molly Young on a walk. The original walk took place along the stretch of a small block on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in June. The journalist spoke to a few local and former residents about the renowned smell of this particular block: 'The street's stink has a menacing quality. To walk down Broome on an August afternoon is to spend a few minutes confronting the idea of dying, rotting, and smelling like Broome Street. The source of the smell is unknown.' When the 'experts' joined Young, they tried their best to sniff out what the challenging stench could be. Museum curator Chandler Burr identified what he could, isolating 'hot oil in a wok' and 'Chinese cabbage'. This practice is smellwalking, another idea created by Douglas Porteous in his work on sensory geographies. Kate McLean discovered this article and decided to follow in their steps in hopes of finding a way to map the copious smells found on the singular block in New York. She did so by going on her own walk, noting down each smell she encountered on a map before going home to translate it digitally.
New York's Smelliest Blocks, a map by Kate McLean (2011)
Initially, the work appears to be an intriguing and experimental way to gain a particular viewpoint of a neighbourhood. Attempting to decode the layered meanings of a place through olfactory recording is often a fruitful way to gain insight into the history and livelihood of an area. Looking at McLean's other mapping works, such as her collaborative virtual project with NHS workers within a hospital in which she consulted nurses and patients on the smells found in a particular ward, this format can be an intimate and evaluative way of collaborating to form new joint meanings of a particular location.
However, when contending with embodied research methods which consider that our whole bodies 'make sense of the world and produce knowledge' rather than differentiating the body and mind as disparate forms, we must interrogate the power structures that researchers may reinforce. This is only more important when dealing with cartographic practices, as maps 'can [and do] structure power, construct identity, and shape movement through a landscape'. McLean's olfactory intervention (as well as the initial researchers') took place in a predominantly East Asian area of New York. The act of mapping here appears as a charged demarcation of space when attaching emotive language, as the title demonstrates. Olfactory researcher Hsuan L. Hsu highlights the issues with this process of 'indiscriminately combining potentially toxic chemical odours such as "perfume" and "car oil" with organic odours—like "five-spice" and "dried fish"—whose "smelliness" has more to do with cultural preferences than environmental health'. The subjective nature of smell as a perceptual process signifies that the relationships we form and the interactions we have with the public olfactory landscape will always be contested. Public space is political, and only more so when scent is the subject; if those with more power can determine 'what counts as just a public nuisance or an actual environmental hazard', it is pivotal to examine whose embodied experience is being represented.
Exploring interiors:
On the other hand, there are olfactory interventions that interact with internal space and place – perhaps inside a building, an art gallery, or a more closed ecosystem such as a vehicle. Museum studies have developed in recent years to consider olfactory components as a way to expand the visitor experience further than just the nature of heritage objects, such as the oil paint of a portrait, having naturally occurring smells. The aim is 'to connect artworks, smells and the public, enabling visitors to feel deep attachment to pieces of art and evoke autobiographical memories. As a result, audiences are encouraged to share their experiences of the visit, so smells, and the associated emotions, become a tool to develop and strengthen social bonds.'
Outside of public buildings, though, it is interesting to consider how creative olfactory practitioners are using scent in more intimate ways to disrupt the place around them. In a podcast interview on HOME Impressions with multi-disciplinary artist Ronan McKenzie, perfumer, writer, and artist Ezra-Lloyd Jackson coined a new olfactory term: "Terraforming is reconditioning space, usually geologically, to accommodate a certain function or process. Olfactory terraforming is more metaphysical, it's about building an environment. Not even just in physical objects but in an ancestral sense of reshaping what might be an unfamiliar scent environment in the form of incense, Florida Water, even the spices we cook with." Jackson's concept of 'terraforming' evidences the development of scent terminology in its short linguistic journey. The early theorists in the twentieth century may have decided that scent is important, but to whom and why? Jackson discusses the spiritual disconnection felt within foreign spaces and suggests this as an active process to interrogate and overlay the environment with new cultural meanings. It is engaging with the room to decolonise or destabilise the associations that can be made by the smellscape that is present.
Furthermore, it has been suggested that scents 'can undergo a process of patrimonialisation' by representing a particular place and therefore becoming part of its cultural heritage. Jackson speaks of his connection to a set of Ghanaian wood sculptures due to their evocative smoked wood scent that transports him to deeply rooted memories from his childhood. This process is interesting to consider when analysing the relationship between olfaction and space and place, as it proposes that a particular scent can become symbolic of a location, the smell becoming the primary sense and subsuming visual or textual significance.
Other forms of olfactory intervention in interior spaces may take an architectural route rather than a spiritual methodology. Jorge Otero-Pailos' 'An Olfactory Reconstruction of Philip Johnson's Glass House' was an experimental olfactory preservation project. Its aims were to observe the iconic Glass House built by American architect Philip Johnson from the perspective of scent to see how it might change the way the building is reconstructed. Otero-Pailos created three layers of scent to evoke the structure's history through its material qualities. The scents are designed to be smelled in sequence. The first is 'a blend of newly lacquered wood closets, newly painted steel, fresh plaster from the ceiling, cement mortar from the floor and a hint of leather from the new Barcelona chairs and the bathroom ceiling.' The second is 'composed of lavender, bergamot, rosewood, lemon, geranium, clove, amber and tobacco' to recreate the common notes of men's cologne in the mid to late 1950s. This was to give the olfactory profile a human quality, reflecting the way that the house was inhabited for over fifty years. The final olfactory creation reconstructs the smell of the house in the 1960s, by which point 'its porous surfaces, especially the plaster ceiling, had become impregnated with the smoke of thousands of cigarettes and cigars. It is composed of a mix of absolutes of dry leaves of tobacco with pure cigar effect.' This method of retrospectively drawing upon small features within the construction of the building creates a hauntological effect by producing a molecular ghost of the house. This project is of particular note in the way that it interrogates cultural heritage and sensory practice. Otero-Pailos' research poses challenges to the notion of ignoring or de-odorising historical and contemporary sites of interest. Perhaps there are layers of artistic and social meaning that are lost and opportunities for speculation left unexplored.
These case studies give a small insight into the breadth of creative and academic work that is using scent as a tool for investigation. As both the art world and the academy become more receptive to olfaction as a transferable and interdisciplinary research field, investment in harm reduction is necessary to avoid assumptive embodied research. The space for olfaction to be utilised as a politically critical instrument needs to be bolstered, as it has the radical potential for collaborative intimacy. Creative olfactory interventions have the capacity to create experimental new narratives, but more importantly, perhaps, they can provide a language with which we can understand what we feel and know intuitively about the spaces around us.
Philip Johnson outside the Glass House, 1966. Photography: New York Daily News/Getty Images.