Sissel Tolaas

Sissel Tolaas

Sissel Tolaas is an artist and researcher from Norway and Iceland who since 1987 is based in Berlin. After studying mathematics, chemical science, linguistics, languages and visual art, Sissel has concentrated on the topic of smell and relationship between smell and language.

 Her work focuses on exploring the unique smellscapes of different cities, yet influential — perhaps in part because, amazingly, no one actually understands how the sense of smell works. She realised that we only use two terms in relation to smells, those being ‘good or bad’.

Until we have smell-o-vision, her work is almost aggressively analog--"beyond what is seen and heard to something indiscernible yet more immediately telling than anything else"; smells are impossible to show online, impossible to experience without a physical and emotional response. It is this response, this primitive communication and understanding through smell that she captures in her work.

Interspersed between the pages of the fascinating interview where she discusses her inspirations, her intentions, and her process are blank pages ( image below) coated with fancy scratch-and-sniff micro-bubbles of her scent creations. As you rub the pages between your fingers, the scents are released, almost like the perfume samples stinking up women's fashion magazines but much more powerful and evocative than any advertisement.

‘You’re presented with three of the 40 variations on stinky socks in Tolaas’s scent collection, then made to question why they smell any worse to you than, say, fresh strawberries. Suddenly it dawns on you that you know almost nothing about your sense of smell, despite the fact that you breathe in about 27,000 times each day. You feel humbled,' she says.

Challenging people to use their noses she says ,  gives them new methods to approach their
 realities; it doesn’t matter whether they smell a so-called bad or good smell. What counts
 is that they rediscover their own surroundings in that very moment—be it other human
 beings, places, the city — and start to approach it differently.

 ‘In the beginning [...], I created weather situations that didn’t exist. I was trying to provoke people to talk about the weather in a different way. So I created these situations in my lab or in my flat where you had sunshine or explosions, hurricanes… It was during these experiments that I discovered smell’

I think her work is very interesting, she says that she collects smells instead of writing a dairy. she passionately describes her olfactory system and how is gives us a new knowledge of our surroundings. At the heart of her work lies a spatio-political project inevitably bound up with an ethics of practice:' If smell surrounds us as an invisible architecture, does it offer the potential for change?'  Sissell Tolaas,  http://mono-kultur.com/issues/23