Titled “Olfactory Mapping: A Scented Narrative of Humanity”, the purpose of this artistic research was to highlight the significance of the olfactory system in sociological contexts by designing an olfactory mapping system, and to define its potential in the fields of arts and sciences, through the mapping of olfactory (smell) descriptions with relevant anthropological and linguistic links, using memory as support.
This 140cm x 100cm digital print on 100% cotton contains the embroidered olfactory data of the 50+ people who participated in this study from over 17 countries and 30 cities. The information collected from the study is visualized into a tangible anthropogenic odor map completed and linked with scented thread, based on the participants’ demographics, geographical regions and personal relationship with scent. Golden threads link all our commonalities in smell memory together, while silver threads connect our place of origin with where we currently reside.
The inspiration behind this project came from my fascination of the human senses and how sensory stimulation can evoke lost memories in certain individuals with amnesia. This project tackling the olfactory system questions how it defines the way we think and act by interacting with emotional memory.
Knowing that smell is able to evoke lost memories even in individuals with Alzheimer’s and dementia, this project demonstrates an understanding of how we are able to remember a smell without ever smelling it again, but only through the recollection of childhood and mostly positive memories, indicating the experience as humanity’s version of time travel. This project is another way of capturing and visualizing an intangible realm such as smell memory in an informative, meaningful and tactile way. The main questions that could be derived from viewing and experiencing the multi-sensorial artwork is personal, existential and self-reflective: “Where am I in this equation, how can I identify myself, and who can I relate to?”.