#1 Research report: Olfactory Ekphrasis & Scented Scenographics at CIHA2024

Viveka Kjellmer presented her research on scented communication in art in the session Curating and Preserving Olfactory Art and Heritage, curated by Marjolijn Bol, Olivier David and Érika Wicky.

Vivekas presentation, Olfactory ekphrasis and scented scenographics: understanding olfaction as communication tool in artworks and exhibitions, highlighted different ways to understand scented aspects of art and exhibition design.

From the abstract: "Using a theoretical framework based on critical scenography, multisensory exhibition design, and art history, this study focuses on scenographic and linguistic activation of the sense of smell. The presentation examines olfactory communication, scenting strategies, and description of olfactory elements in art. A scented material can be chemically described, but its' meaning in relation to an artwork needs a different approach. I discuss olfactory ekphrasis, interpretative scent description, as a method to systematically explore scented elements in art to understand not only what the scents are, but also what they do."

The session Curating and Preserving Olfactory Art and Heritage, focused on how scented aspects of art and heritage can be presented, preserved, and not least, understood.

Although invisible and intangible, smells emanate from matter and are themselves material. For this reason, they offer a singular perspective on the materiality of arts that traditionally address the sense of sight. At the crossroads of two approaches that emerged in the 1990's - smell studies (Classen and Al., 1994) and technical art history (Wallert and al., 1995) - the olfactory approach to art and heritage has recently become internationally established in museums and academia. In addition to the recent emergence of contemporary olfactory art (Shiner, 2020 ; Barré, 2021), which offers an aesthetic experience based on the sense of smell (Jaquet, 2015), the smell of artefacts is increasingly taken into consideration (Classen, 2017), as it can provide information on their history (Castel, 2019) or on their state of conservation (Bembibre, 2020). If it has thus become common to consider perfume as art or odor as heritage the challenges related to the material specificity of odors, characterized by their ephemeral nature, remain mostly underexplored. This calls for new theoretical and methodological tools that are necessarily interdisciplinary and likely to renew the discipline of art history.

This innovative session was important beacuse it brought attention to olfactory art and communication.

Viveka Kjellmer

More info here: https://openagenda.com/fr/ciha-2024/events/curating-and-preserving-olfactory-art-and-heritage