This project stems from the "We're all 7 million years old" group, which focuses on memory and mental images, drawing on art, archaeology and neuroscience. It's a group of variable dimensions made up of a neuroscience researcher, a physicist, an anthropologist, an artist and guests. Asking the question of memory and its mechanisms opens up a vast field of research into the image, the image of the origin or birth of images, and enables us to deconstruct our relationship with them.

This installation brings together 17 different scents, revealed during a collective performance. The film covering the scents is scratched with fingernails, car keys, house keys, coins... People crouch down, gather together, stand on tiptoe, kneel... to smell the scents.

Jardin vue montagne à droite (Garden with mountain view on the right) and Saisons savoisiennes (Savoyard seasons) on the left are two olfactory landscapes.

The result is the act of smelling : frantic scratching as if to win the jackpot, small discreet scratches and sometimes the inevitable tags as the irrepressible need to write himself.

**Photographic portrait series The Sense of the Middle, or how to place emphasis on a neglected sense—smell—yet one located at the very center of the face. Only the nose is visible, protruding alone, like an exposed sensor. These portraits of noses are accompanied by the voices of people encountered by chance along the roads of Savoie: foragers, farmers, herbalists, gardeners… People whose activities are intimately connected to smells and tastes, who live with the landscape and often even shape it.

Because smelling is already a form of tasting, I trace an olfactory path through uses, memories, and gestures that bind us to the landscape. Smell is the only one of our senses that communicates directly with our emotions; what we breathe in—often without thinking about it—shapes our experience of the world. In this project, I wanted to give smell its place, to make the invisible into a sensitive material.

Odor is a medium that remains rare in the history of Western art. In Menstruation Bathroom (1972), Judy Chicago used the smell of menstruation in her installation to break a taboo; Andy Warhol, for his part, considered that perfume allowed one to occupy more space and used it in his works. Personally, smell interests me for its ability to conjure images and because it compels us to be present, in the moment, breathing.**