HEADWIND brings a breath of fresh air into the world of work. This reviving ambient scent was developed at the Bern University of Applied Sciences Business School in the summer of 2019 in a student project.
Bern
An der Hochschule der Künste Bern wird im laufenden Wintersemester 2018 eine Einführung zu Düften und Gerüchen als Medien in Alltag, Gestaltung & Kunst angeboten. Die Toolbox gehört zum transdisziplinären Lehrangebot Y, das Studierenden aller künstlerischen Disziplinen offen steht.
There is a long lasting history of dealing with scent in pop music. More recently, Jeans for Jesus, a widely known player in the local pop music scene in Switzerland, made an interesting move:
The air freshener Little Tree epitomizes the state of contemporary scent culture. This might sound provocative.
Do you remember the commercials that promote deodorants and openly appeal to sexist phantasies? Women are drawn in hordes to any male who has sprayed himself liberally with the deodorant – the “Axe effect”. The commercials have been known as the world’s sexist advertising campaign for many years.
Marta Kwiatkowski is currently cuarting the art project 17,2m3 Bümpliz, which uses 3 identical transparent cubes to cultivate and concentrate a kind of collective cultural memory trough the interpretation of smell. The project will take place during the big city festival of Bern in August. The artists are Lea-Nina Fischer, Esther Tellenbach, Tamara Hauser, Selina Hofer, Salima Hänni, and Stefanie Janssen. The scents are created by Andreas Wilhelm.
The City of Bern, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is truly a picturesque place. But it is also a city full of fascinating stories of de- and re-odorization.
The city of Bern runs a lively blog that monthly discusses business related issues in the economic area of the Swiss capital. Through it, a diverse selection of people from business, culture, civil service and society engage in public discourse. In this context, Claus Noppeney identifies “olfactory milestones” in the remarkable history of the city and shows how this tradition leads to current product innovation.
It seems, in our times of antiseptic cities and scentless cyber-existence, the hunger for scent in the cultural arena is larger than ever. As such, the Urban Scent Walk (USW) seems to have hit the spot at the 2014 Biennale Bern!
Explore the old town of Bern by nose: How does Bern smell today? What stories do the fragrant and the foul smells in the city tell? How does smell permeate life in the city?
The Urban Scent Walk explores the old town of Bern as a smellscape and an olfactory exhibition: informative, discursive, performative. The guided walk opens up unfamiliar facets in spaces of everyday life. The Situationists spoke of “dérive”, meaning the exploration of cities by wandering through varied environments: natural scents, cloying designer fragrances, fresh site-specific interventions, and cosmetic urban smells.
Odors are hardly ever specifically noted, although they interact with each breath: in a direct manner, volatile molecules produce the moods that characterize the atmosphere of the city. “Smells make it possible to identify locations and to identify with places,” says the philosopher Gernot Böhme. In other words, the nose brings experience that the eyes, mouth and ears are shut out of.