Wenn Düfte erzählen hiess es vom 26. Mai bis zum 2. Juni 2019 in Solothurn. Im Rahmen des Schweizerischen Nationalfonds Agora Projekts Smelling more, smelling differently an der Berner Fachhochschule gab es eine Eventreihe mit mehreren hundert Besuchern, die als innovatives Duft- und Literaturfestival in die Annalen geht: interaktiv, partizipativ & performativ. Die Entwicklung neuer Düfte wurde zuvor in zwei weiteren Nationalfondsprojekten in Bern aus einer Managementperspektive mit einem innovativen Methodenmix untersucht. Wenn Düfte erzählen erweiterte diese Ansätze für den Dialog mit der Öffentlichkeit. Hier ein Rückblick auf Präsentationen, Schreibateliers, Workshops, Lesungen und die Duftbar.
literature
Michel Serres, the French philosopher, died yesterday.
“In their loss, smells have become a literary topic of our time, as much as they are a topic of the world of science and technology and of business.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
“B. O.” is the indispensable Other of the perfume and fragrance industry, despised and feared at the same time; to be eradicated, yet its raison d’etre.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
“Perfumes are the soft-focus lense on our rough daily existence. They are the invisible, user-friendly interface in daily human interaction. They are sheer present – yet we have unearthed their primordial past. They seem pure phenomenon – yet they contain memory, erratic and unpredictable. And although they seem to lend themselves so well to the game of pure simulation, they do have dark and uncanny origins.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
“This Flow’r whose fragrance tender
With sweetness fills the air,
Dispels with glorious splendor
The darkness ev’rywhere.
True Man, yet very God;
From sin and death He saves us
And lightens ev’ry load.”
“We thought it necessary to begin with the sense of smell, because of all the senses it is the one which appears to contribute least to the knowledge of the human mind.” – Etienne Bonnot de CONDILLAC
Scent has so far remained largely sidelined into the context of the eighteenth-century novel. Reading Smell by Emily Friedman and published in 2016 provides models for how to incorporate olfactory knowledge into new readings of the literary form central to our understanding of the eighteenth century and modernity in general: the novel.
Scent Verse is a inspiring poetry project on Basenotes curated by writer Eddie Bulliqi.
“The specific problem with the olfactory in this respect is that its linguistic structure of reference always throws us back into the disorder of things.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
The English author and critic Julie Myerson explores in her fictional piece the smell of a loss. It is amazing how many different associations and aspects are covered in this short piece in the New York Times.
Umberto Eco, the Italian cultural theorist and novelist who became the author of best-selling novels, notably the blockbuster medieval mystery “The Name of the Rose,” died last week in Milan. Eco was a contributor to our thinking on scent culture.
What if every poem had its own fragrance, beyond the literal smell of the materiality of the page? What if one could smell a poet’s imaginative, conceptual, intellectual world, the text unfurling into an aroma? In Volatile!, curator and design historian Debra Riley Parr presents a number of objects and experiences that invite speculative connections between poetry and scent including our friend & collaborator Brian Goeltzenleuchter.
The Book of Scented Things collects poems reflecting the experience of selected vials of perfume.