Odors are perceived with every breath we take and immediately interpreted by the most ancestral parts of our brain. In recent years, researchers and practitioners, from the neurosciences to the humanities, have strived to gain a better understanding of the sense of smell, which deeply, yet often unknowingly, shapes the way we live: our eating habits, our social interactions, our emotions, memories, and even our well-being and safety. Albeit elusive and ephemeral in nature, scents may thus be purposefully used to improve many aspects of our lives. Furthermore, despite its long neglect in the West, smell can also carry cultural, aesthetic, and practical values, as exemplified by a number of ancient and foreign cultures.

All the objects presented in Living With Scents exemplify the many ways in which we can rely on the sense of smell to better our lives. But people living with certain illnesses or disabilities can benefit from smell even more greatly– whether to communicate or help take care of themselves. 

Join MCD and Living with Scents guest curator Clara Muller for a virtual event that spans across the globe– featuring exhibiting artist/designer Peter De Cupere, olfactory curator and perfume historian Lizzie Ostrom, and Dr. Danielle Reed– Associate Director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. This collection of virtual presentations and panel discussion will explore our understanding of why and how scents are so essential to our lives, accessibility, and so much more.

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LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PANELISTS:

CLARA MULLER is a French art historian, critic, and curator, and holds graduate degrees in Literature, Art History, and Museum Studies from La Sorbonne, New York University, and Columbia University. She is pursuing research on the politics of breathing in contemporary art, and writes extensively about the diversity of art practices using scent as a medium. She has contributed to several exhibition catalogues, artists’ monographs, and academic publications on the subject of olfactory art, both in French and in English, such as Les Dispositifs olfactifs au musée (Nez éditions, 2018) and Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance (Routledge, 2020). She has been a writer for the olfactory magazine NEZ since 2016 for which she explores the intersections of perfumery and olfaction with literature, cinema, design, architecture, and the visual arts, and she collaborated with several art publications (Art Press, Possible, Point Contemporain, 10011, Clot Magazine, etc). She also gave several talks worldwide about the various ways in which art and olfaction can meet (MIT, Centre Pompidou, MUDAC, Experimental Scent Summit, Odeuropa, etc). As a curator, she collaborated with the Grand Musée du Parfum in Paris in 2016, and worked on the Nez à Nez. Contemporary Perfumers exhibition at the Museum of Design and Contemporary Applied Arts in Lausanne in 2019. In 2022, she co-curated Living With Scents at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco along with Italian curator Elisabetta Pisu. 

PETER DE CUPERE (born in Leuven, Belgium, 1970) created the Olfabet (2021), an olfactory alphabet developed in collaboration with blind and visually impaired persons to allow them to read with their nose instead of their hands. Each piece of the Olfabet has been finely 3D-printed bearing a braille letter with tiny holes through which is dispensed a scent molecule. Modules can be assembled in plinths and words are formed from the accord of several smells which, in time, can be instantly recognized as a word without having to smell and identify each individual letter. Once this Olfalanguage is learned, the Olfareader device shall allow to scan a written text and translate it into scents. Based on the often-forgotten outstanding discerning capabilities of the human sense of smell, Olfabet invents a new way to link language to the body and to produce meaning. 

LIZZIE OSTROM  is a writer and producer exploring the importance of smell in our everyday lives. She has hosted hundreds of creative perfume events including collaborations with poets, astronomers, chemists, flavourists, and performers. She co-curated Somerset House’s landmark exhibition, Perfume: A Sensory Journey through Contemporary Scent, and has provided installations and educational content for many brands and museums. Lizzie wrote the twentieth century cultural history Perfume: A Century of Scents, and has edited publications including a book celebrating ten years of fragrance forums from the International Fragrance Association UK. Together with the agency Rodd Design Lizzie developed ode, which harnessed the power of smell to support people living with dementia. Most recently Lizzie has hosted Flavour of the Month, a new series of events opening up to the public the little-known world of flavourings in the foods we eat. 

DANIELLE REED is currently the Associate Director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, a non-profit research center that focuses on the study of taste and smell and the allied chemical senses. She is currently a member of the leadership team for the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research and President-Elect of the Association of Chemoreception Sciences. Her laboratory studies person-to-person differences in taste and smell and how inborn genotype contributes to the wide range of human experience.