Upon moving to Berlin, one of the introductory questions one has to get used to is some variation of ‘What brought you here?’ It isn't sufficient, as in many other places, to have an ubeity, to simply exist, maybe by chance, at a particular time and place; or perhaps it's merely one of those places where the majority have come from somewhere else.
When I arrived, and perhaps still today, I have a sense that that question is seeking out an answer for the asker, as much as about the askee, to find out if there is some purpose, any purpose, to one's having made the increasingly rash decision to jump with all the other filings to a strong magnet, a decision that needs must be highly individualised, and yet which few seem to have a rationale for.
I think it may have been with this spirit that I started casting about for social encounters, activities that bound people, cultural life, as soon as I settled in. I was helped in this endeavour, at that time, by Meetup, the platform for such activity-based groups. While its function has mostly been superceded for me by knowledge of the city and word-of-mouth from a built-up network, I initially found a few groups to dip my toes in through the platform, such as English-German tandem evenings. The one which stuck, though, was an entry in the list that read “Smell Lab Berlin”.
I had no idea what that meant. So I had to find out.
On the pleasant and hazy border between grungy Neukölln and bougie Neukölln, a former bakery (or so I'd heard) had recently been converted into an art space/bar, under the name of Spektrum. In fact, the bar was mostly an excuse for the brick-and-mortar, to offset the running costs and provide attendees with the opportunity for refreshment. Created by Alfredo Ciannameo & Lieke Ploeger, the concept was to foster culture, and more specifically art-science intersections, by founding what they referred to as ‘communities’—aheirarchical collectives with minimal leadership that regularly met to work on a mutual interest, while remaining continually open to the public1. Among other groups, including the LC (Live Cinema) Lab, experimenting with digital audio-visual improvisation, and movLab, exploring motion-capture technology, the founders approached olfactory practitioners Klara Ravat & Claudia—now Lauryn Mannigel—to be the two ‘community supporters’ in charge of organising a community around the art and science of smell.
Having run across the listing on Meetup, I showed up at Spektrum one late summer evening in 2015, having by then accomplished such introductory tasks as wandering about the city, finding a day job and a long-term flatshare, and trying some of the best eateries in town, for the group's second gathering. I had very little idea about what exactly it would entail, but I might have expected the contents, which involved sitting around a table and sniffing some aromatic items that people had brought with them. What I could not have anticipated was how engaging and welcoming this still-nascent community was, and the welcome feeling of simply gathering on an evening because of some mutual interest.
I returned to another meeting, then a third. Before long, it became clear that in addition to one-time or occasional attendees, impelled by presumably the same curiosity as I initially was, there was a smaller core of repeat participants, who began to behave more like a collective. These were: Mareike Bode, Daria Chesnokova, Max Joy, Sheraz Khan, Alanna Lynch, and Chaveli Sifre—a motley assembly of designers, academics, and artists. We read materials, gave each other presentations, tried out simple experiments, share knowledge of how to distill and extract, and, of course, smelled a lot of things. After a number of these fortnightly meetings and a few months had gone by, this inner core began to arrange meeting outside of the regular meetups as well, both socially and to organise. By then, however, a difference in ideas for the direction and purpose of the community led to Claudia withdrawing from the meetups and eventually starting an independent reading group to focus on the theoretical aspects of olfaction2, leaving Klara as the sole community supporter, and the collective remained in this configuration about as long as I was involved.
Later in that year, we were informed that Spektrum wanted each of the communities to present some of their ongoing work once a year, as part of the transmediale/CTM Vorspiel in January. To that end, we—particularly the emergent core—began brainstorming projects we could create to present. Several performative ideas were suggested; in the end, we settled on more of an installation with some mild performative elements. By December, we had decided upon the concept and the method: we would collect scents from the area around Spektrum by impregnating small scraps of cloth and extracting the aromas trapped within with steam distillation; of the resulting successful liquid scents we would curate a set to represent this distinctive quarter of Kreuz-kölln, and the subjective experience(s) we had had of it; these would be in turn re-impregnated into larger pieces of cloth which we would suspend from Spektrum's ceiling, allowing for a consumable, canvas-like medium that visitors could take in one at a time. This process entailed several challenges. The first being that not all of the candidate scents we chose successfully impregnated into the cloth swatches—no matter, we had a descent enough selection to choose from. The choice of cloth itself turned out not to be the ideal medium for ab-/adsorbtion, and despite thorough washing retained a slight scent of its own that contaminated the weaker samples. In any case, the resultant distillates were mostly fairly weak, and would dissapate after a short while, whereas we wanted to hold our installation over a few hours. This we solved by simply incorporating the reapplication of the scent performatively, placing the distillate in spray bottles and misting the cloths with them at regular intervals.
In the end, we chose five scents to represent that area of Neukölln, and our impressions of it: the scent of earth and leaves, for the urban trees and park-like banks of the canal; the scent of an ashtray, for the frequent-enough smoking; a collection of a few herbs and spices to evoke the Turkish Market on the Maybachufer, a scant two blocks away; the scent of a döner, the omnipresent fusion fast food; and the scent of sweat, to represent the even-more-omnipresent human element. On one of our scent-scouting expeditions, we were accompanied by a couple journalists3, sensing a story in the cluster of people wandering through the streets and smelling everything around them, from canal water to autoshop equipment.
The exhibition took place on January 20th, with a decent turnout. So as not to overwhelm the faint scents on the cloths, we let people in small groups into the larger back room of Spektrum, where most of our meetings had taken place, and which was closed by a large metal door, lending something of a dramatic effect to opening and sealing in successive visitors. Inside the back room, large swaths of an undyed fabric—linen, I think, but perhaps cotton—bought at the nearby Turkish Market had been suspended from a simple grid under the ceiling; the cross of neon lights likewise suspended were left off, with warmer flood lights on the walls lending a more contemplative atmosphere. I had brought by a set of tiny vials for that evening, but had to leave the others to set up everything else, as I had agreed to take part in a workshop/devising session for a potential theatre piece4, my first return to the medium since completing my undergraduate degree and hightailing it to Europe. After riding a couple U-Bahn stops back, I found everything prepared, and a modest crowd spilling out of the bar. We charged no entry fee, but decided to collect small donations in exchange for a souvenir of the exhibition: a vial of one of the distilled scents, at random, in an envelope with a card. It seemed like a fun, if mostly symbolic, way for people to retain something physical of the ephemeral (and mostly invisible) installation. One by one, the members of the public made their way to each of the sheets in turn, leaning forward, and inhaling. It was a simple setup and a small exhibition, but the concept and the novelty provoked conversation quite quickly.
It made for an enjoyable evening all together, and an interesting first project with a lovely group of people. We would work together again on a second piece of olfactory art about six months later, something of a sequel we decided to call Connected Smells.