Chasing the Fragrant Silence - Smell as a Medium for Artistic Creation

Abstract

Why do we learn to see, but not to smell?The five-sense division established a cultural predominance for sight and hearing above the remaining senses. In the occident, smell has had a secondary role, whereas in other contexts the relation with olfaction is indissociable from cultural and social organization. Philosophical tradition has denied olfaction aesthetic capabilities and consequently, artistic ones too. This paper questions whether this is rather a lack of awareness, education and exploitation of the sense of smell, as opposed to an inherent limitation of the sense itself. Contemporary artistic practice, increasingly diversified in its forms of expression, sees a growing number of artists using smell as a medium. The development of a performance, the practical component of this project, led to a personal exploration of smell as a medium, in order to clarify my own relationship with smell, and its artistic capabilities - contributing to the development of a poiesis of smell.