The Sense of Smell

Collaborative work with Silje Linge Haaland. Exploration and researches on the sense of smell, 2006

In the 18th and 19th century, western philosophers and scientists condemned the sense of smell to be a primitive and brutal sense. Because of its emotional potential, the smell was felt to threaten the impersonal, rational detachment in modern scientific thinking. This is the reason why there is far less knowledge about the sense of smell, compared to the more “high-status” senses as vision and hearing. We interviewed people with a questionnaire in which we presented some emotions. We asked the people to describe which scent they associated more with the different emotions. In the summer of 2006 we made an installation introducing the six scents most repeatedly answered in the questionnaire. People where able to smell the different scents through diving-masks, mounted in a hexagonal pillar. Inside the pillar we mounted a heating lamp to intensify the scents.  During the show, we interviewed the “smellers” to find out which associations the scents would generate.