Although invisible and intangible, smells emanate from matter and are themselves material. For this reason, they offer a singular perspective on the materiality of arts that traditionally address the sense of sight. At the crossroads of two approaches that emerged in the 1990’s - smell studies (Classen and Al., 1994) and technical art history (Wallert and al., 1995) - the olfactory approach to art and heritage has recently become internationally established in museums and academia. In addition to the recent emergence of contemporary olfactory art (Shiner, 2020 ; Barré, 2021), which offers an aesthetic experience based on the sense of smell (Jaquet, 2015), the smell of artefacts is increasingly taken into consideration (Classen, 2017), as it can provide information on their history (Castel, 2019) or on their state of conservation (Bembibre, 2020). If it has thus become common to consider perfume as art or odor as heritage the challenges related to the material specificity of odors, characterized by their ephemeral nature, remain mostly underexplored. This calls for new theoretical and methodological tools that are necessarily interdisciplinary and likely to renew the discipline of art history.

In particular, curating and preserving smells raises new challenges that this panel seek to explore through questions arising from concrete case studies related to early modern and modern periods (exhibitions, artworks, historical reconstructions, etc.): First of all, which smells are worth preserving, and according to which criteria should the contents of olfactory archives be selected? How do the different actors (curators, conservators, public, etc.) use their sense of smell and how can they be trained? How can we capture the smells of the current times and document smells for archival purposes, given that the use of formulas favored by the perfume industry has major limitations (such as the identification of raw materials)? How to adapt the tools of art history (description, illustration, etc.) to the new medium of olfaction and how to make olfactory descriptions/diagnoses provided by perfumers (noses) objective so that curators can benefit from them? How to archive the smells themselves and preserve the olfactory works of art? How to preserve olfactory historical reconstructions and to document a process that will become part of the history of olfactory culture? How to manage copyright issues since a perfume cannot be legally considered as a work of the mind and how to create an open archive? How to define olfactory authenticity and therefore evaluate the accuracy of reconstructions? How to implement historically accurate olfactory projects and how to communicate about the historical accuracy of the olfactory reconstructions? These are some of the questions arising from the blooming of smells in art and museums. This panel aims to stimulate interdisciplinary exchanges between researchers and actors in order to start answering these questions and to set up good practices regarding the curation and preservation of olfactory art and heritage.

Talks :

• Sandra BARRÉ - Olfactory archive. The scientific necessity of olfactory reconstructions in twentieth-century art
• Isabelle CHAZOT - L'Osmothèque: Challenges of preserving and reconstituting perfumes
• Viveka KJELLMER - Olfactory ekphrasis and scented scenographics: understanding olfaction as communication tool in artworks and exhibitions
• Cecilia BEMBIBRE, George ALEXOPOULOS, Emma PAOLIN - Revealing and preserving the value of olfactory heritage: a cross-disciplinary approach