published by the Facim, Mountain Arts and Culture Foundation
a work resulting from the residency Les paysages du goût in Savoy, Alps
a scented book with Les sens des Alpes
with OAP researchers : Laurence Fanuel, Martine Adrian Scotto and Gabriel Gandolfo
Ed. Facim
200 exp.
offset
32 pages color
perfumed
Part of OAP project, winner of the innivative projects grant EUR CREATES, UniCA
PRICE 10 €
To order, contact the author directly
Series of photographic portraits The sense of the middle (Le sens du milieu), or how to emphasise an unloved sense – smell – which is nevertheless located in the centre of the face. All we see is the nose, alone in front, like an exposed sensor. These portraits of noses are accompanied by the voices of people encountered at random on the roads of Savoie: pickers, farmers, herbalists, gardeners... People whose activities are closely linked to smells and tastes, who live with the landscape and often even shape it.
Because smelling is already tasting, I trace an olfactory path through the customs, memories and gestures that connect us to the landscape. Smell is the only one of our senses that communicates directly with our emotions; what we breathe, 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 a tangible material. Smell is a medium that is too 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 believed that perfume allowed one to take up more space and used it in his works. Personally, I am interested in smell for its ability to conjure up images and because it forces you to be present, in the moment, breathing.
Here we find a collection of snapshots of good and bad smells. We realise that a smell we considered bad can, over time, be perceived differently; that smells are markers of identity and that many of our memories are attached to them. Our nose, never closed, always on the alert, informs us of everything and warns us. It precedes us. And it is through it that we have the ability to create images in the recesses of our brain, images that, along with the smell, spring to mind: they surge forth. It is behind our eyelids that all the work is done in silence.
Caroline Bouissou
This project is part of the OAP project, winner of the EUR CREATES ‘Innovative Projects’ grant, UniCA
developed during the Les paysages du goût residency, Facim
