By Alessia Ugolin. Cover image: Antonella Ramos.
Scent has a unique ability to shape our perception of a place, often surpassing the influence of sight. When we speak about an olfactory landscape, we refer to the range of smells present in a specific area of the city—the smells experienced by people, which can evoke pleasant or unpleasant emotions. They include the aromas of shops, food, animals, and the human presence itself.
When we immerse ourselves in an environment, we engage with the space using more than just our sight; we involve our entire body. In fact, when we recall a place, we often remember the smells associated with it. Our sense of smell frequently plays a key role in shaping our overall perception of that environment.
Have you ever wandered about the magic emotional power of an Olfactory Walk?
Smellwalking: Mapping Cities Through Scent
Smellscapes, or olfactory landscapes, are explored through the practice of smell-walking, which involves walking through a city in groups, creating an immersive olfactory experience where participants focus on the scents they perceive and share their thoughts on what they are experiencing at that moment. These walks lead to the creation of sensory maps, which are thematic charts that outline the olfactory profile of a city.
As participants in the Master’s program in Olfactory Experience Management for the Luxury Industry, we had the opportunity to engage in practical exercises guided by tutors Claudio Granato and Enrico Pieraccioli. This experience helped us understand how the senses shape our perception of space, defining its limits and boundaries, and how they contribute to a cognitive experience.
Olfactory Walk phase 1. Exploring Florence, a Sensory Journey Through the City
During our exploration of Florence, we directed our attention to the sensory experiences offered by various locations throughout the city. We paid particular attention to the main hall of the Istituto Marangoni School, a construction site on Via dei Corsi, a Feltrinelli bookstore, and, finally, the lively crowd in Piazza della Repubblica and the peaceful courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi. This sensory walk resulted in a rich tapestry of impressions, traces, signs, and emotional echoes that together illustrated the unique sensory atmospheres of the spaces we encountered.
This perspective reveals a new way of perceiving our environment, one that aligns with the concept of psychogeography defined by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. It represents a departure that is not aimed at moving elsewhere but rather returning to our place and ourselves, focusing on our perception of the current moment. This involves observing and documenting its marks and the effects of space on our perceptive faculties.
Maki Ueda and the Art of Olfactory Experiences
Artist Maki Ueda focuses her research on the spatial nature of olfactory art, combining digital art with the creation of installations that emphasise smells, which tell the story of a specific space. After relocating to the Netherlands, she found the cultural differences from her home country to be a valuable foundationfor exploring daily life. This exploration is exemplified in her work, Scents of Holland (2008), which serves as an olfactory portrait of her adopted country through its typical smells, such as hyacinths, cheese, spices, and Brussels sprouts.
Olfactory Walks as Political Practice: Raising Awareness of Environmental Odors
Beyond its artistic aspects, the practice of olfactory walks has evolved into a powerful political tool. These walks raise awareness of the environmental impacts of scent and promote a deeper understanding of how smells shape the identity and memory of a place. Sissel Tolaas has focused her research on this area, creating an olfactory map of fifty-two cities around the world and cataloguing over seven thousand scents in a personal olfactory vocabulary.
The Future of Smellscapes: Preserving the Scents of the Oceans
Since 2017, Sissel Tolaas has been working on an archive dedicated to the oceans in a project called Ocean SmellScapes. The project catalogues oceanic odours along the coasts of the Caribbean and the Pacific in Costa Rica, one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. The olfactory data she collects seeks to preserve and convey information about the invisible layers of the oceans, with the goal of safeguarding these scents for the future. This is especially important considering potential losses due to coastal pollution, climate change, and inadequate environmental protection measures.
Scents activate visitors’ senses, evoking both familiar and unknown patterns, as well as landscapes that may soon vanish, causing memories of these places to fade. Through these olfactory experiences, we can gain a deeper understanding of the true power of scent in shaping our world.
