smellmap of singapore
Kate McLean mapping scents , smells of cities that she explores with her nose in front of her, in olfactory walks that the artist and designer calls smellwalks ; because she is British; for more detail, of Hartfield, a small town in East Sussex that smells Winnie the Pooh and the Hundred Acre Wood.
She has sniffed some fourteen cities till the date : Amsterdam , despite its fame, smells more like waffle and herring than to marijuana; the sunsets in Singapore are perfumed with jasmine and frangipani ; the Lower East Side of New York reeks of dried fish and motor oil; the market of Noailles emanates the essence of an everyday and multi-ethnic Marseille…
scientists say that human beings are capable of distinguishing more than a trillion different smells … Passing stenches and aromas to remember that are part of the landscape and the travel experience.
What are your smell maps for?
My smellmaps are deliberately designed as a challenge . They are an invitation to dissent and disagreement that I hope will encourage passers-by to walk, smell and experience the landscape of aromas. In addition, they help us to appreciate the cultural and geographic diversity of a place that, otherwise, is reduced to a single word: its name on a map. But there are also people who buy my smellmaps to hang on the wall, because they find them simply eye-catching.
You design them from the data collected during your smellwalks. What do these olfactory walks consist of?
There are several types. The most common is a group walk where I provide participants with basic odor detection strategies; then we start to “collect samples” and register them. At certain points we stop to share individual experiences, that I try to explain from theories of the meaning of human smell.
Why should we travel with the nose?
It's not that we should travel with our nose, but I think that changing our main receptor of stimuli from time to time is interesting to know from a new perspective a place that is already quite familiar to us. Visit a city using multiple senses is much more enriching: it allows us to question what our eyes tell us about that place, it places us as human animals within the ecological context of our environment, and the novelty slow down our steps , making it possible to discover changes around us that we might otherwise miss.
kyiv smells of pine and joy
You have taken olfactory walks around Pamplona and Barcelona: where would you take us to smell them?
The beauty of the smell of Barcelona lies in its narrow streets and its proximity to sea, so I would recommend a walk around Barceloneta, where the clean laundry mixed with the aromas of kitchen , divine! In Pamplona, I would go to the Citadel, to smell the grass, the trees and the mountain air.
What are the olfactory landscapes that most impressed you in…?
- Paris: The smell of sanctity and sleaze, from the Sacré-Coeur to Pigalle.
- Amsterdam: The smell of incense and food, from the Nieuwmarkt all the way down Zeedijk Street.
- New York: The smell of diversity on Roosevelt Avenue, Queens, at seven in the morning.
- Kyiv: The smell of pine and moments of joy along the Dnieper River.
- Marseille: The smell of commercial activity in the Place de Noailles.
- Milan: The smell of people and perfume during Design Week.
- Tallinn: The smell of wood and mulled wine, from Raekoja Plats to the city walls via Pikk Street.
- Marrakesh: The smell of the market and leather in the souk of the tanners.
- Edinburgh: It's a cocktail of beer, grass, cherry blossoms, sea and chip shop.
Even so, it must be taken into account that no place smells of just one thing, because odors are made up of multiple olfactory molecules (just one strawberry already contains up to 350 volatile organic compounds ) .
What does Pamplona smell like?
"Each city, let me tell you, has its own smell," wrote E.M. Forster in 'A Room with a View'. Is this still true or do cities smell more and more the same?
Both the expert in human geography J. Douglas Porteous like the town planner victoria henshaw point to the growing homogenization of cities in this sense, caused by our desire to control and minimize odors and by globalization.
What does globalization smell like?
to the soap shops Lush , at least to me… All in all, each city is a great living organism located in a unique geographical and meteorological environment; I mean, there will always be small differences among them that the human nose will easily recognize. I am still optimistic.
Are there smells that you miss?
The smell of sun cream, chewing gum, clay, a bonfire… and the smell of local industries, such as breweries or you would have, because you don't have to like a smell to miss it. Although my data shows how more than fifty percent of the registered odors are considered positive, even those recorded during a summer in New York! Smell is an essential part of a place and you have to know how to appreciate it. It is something much more complex than a molecule: it is an ephemeral experience, a moment in time, it depends on an emission source, an environment, a context...
** Cecilia Bembire is a scientist who is collecting the effluvia from emblematic places (St. Paul's Cathedral Library, Lindisfarne Castle, Knole House…) to create a catalog of historical smells…**
Cecilia's work is fabulous, exhaustive and really interesting. Part of my research project also consists of archiving odours, but in a different way. different . Currently, there are perfume museums , so it would be a good time to develop a “Center of Vernacular Smells” somewhere, to promote the appreciation of non-specialized olfactory knowledge in our daily lives.
Then there are museums like the Jorvik Viking Center in York, which reproduces in its facilities what a Viking village must have smelled like...
Jorvik was ahead of its time - it opened its doors in 1984 - but it still uses synthetic fragrances... If the tourism industry wanted to value smells, it should take as an example Japan , which has declared **sites of special olfactory interest** all over the country: from the smell of kimchi and barbecue at Tsuruhashi Station in Osaka, to the sea mist of Kushiro or the second-hand bookstores in Kanda.
Why has so little attention been paid to our nose?
Cultural theorists suggest that smell has been undervalued for three main reasons: Enlightenment thought's contempt for a subjective sense , its relationship with disgusting and illness, and difficulty capture it and play it. However, other cultures have shown very different attitudes in this regard; I recommend Dr. Classen's book Scent: the cultural history of smell who wants to know more about it.
What are the next places you'd like to sniff and map?
So far I have mapped fourteen cities, but they are all located in the North Hemisphere. I want to balance my work and carry out projects in the southern hemisphere; I am really looking forward to India, Japan, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Australia and Brazil.
Edinburgh smells on a windy day
**TIPS FOR AN OLFACTORY WALK (from Kate McLean's recommendations)**
1. Avoid smellwalking when you are cold or hangover ; nose performance could be significantly affected.
two. It's important to be well hydrated, because the nose needs fluids to dissolve and read odors.
3. If you notice that the emanations around you begin to fade, it is most likely due to the fatigue of your olfactory receptors, which end up adapting to the environment. To fix it you have to roll up your sleeves and sniff your forearm.
Four. The more varied the scenarios of the chosen route, the greater the range of odors detected and the greater the learning. Choose open and closed spaces, quiet and busy streets, etc.
5. Help yourselves other senses to find odours.
6. Heels and shame are left at home. No need to worry about what others will think; sniffing around a dumpster or park benches is weird, okay, but totally legit.