Sissel Tolaas

 “We breathe up to 24,000 times a day”, says the smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas. “Every breath provides nanolevels of information about the world, yet we have, essentially, forgotten how to use this information properly.” Tolaas believes that we experience life too much via sight and sound and literally forget or even neglect the other senses, especially the sense of smell. Tolaas has dedicated most of her life to making the invisible accessible, putting visitors’ noses to work above other senses. She is a chemist and a “smell activist” who, through her varied and compelling research and artworks, challenges us and makes us think about smell through the process of smelling. 

In the middle of the Lower Austrian Government District in St. Pölten, Tolaas invites us to sniff the columns, the pillars of the local parliament building. The artist has collected and replicated real sweat from several men in fear. The smells are nanoembedded onto the pillars of an untouchable powerful building. Nothing is more true than a real smell and these smells tell real stories about these men. The smells can only be activated through embracing and touching the pillars—as if one is embracing and touching a real person—a provocative act. As humans, we sweat continuously for various reasons, including self-regulation in response to high temperatures, stress, love, fear, arguments, competition or exercise. Bacteria can give sweat a different smell in different contexts.

Over the past century, a vast industry has grown in order to deodorise the world, selling billions of products for covering up the real, the truth—a metaphor that can also be applied to politics. The work Fear of Smell / Smell of Fear _12_24 on the governmental pillars brings back truth through smell and also combats olfactory illiteracy in order to get rid of prejudice and rethink molecular exchange as a form of non-verbal communication. For Tolaas, relearning to smell is political. It is a way of training us to be tolerant, to be interested in invisible information, to be conscious of all kinds of bodily responses and senses, of differences, emotions, needs and diversity. 

Fear of Smell / Smell of Fear _12_24 tells us that smell is about REAL life and living, that we can only build a more tolerant society if we embrace its diversity. As the artist says, “If people get the message through the nose, they really get the message.”

Sissel Tolaas (1965 in Norway) has been working, researching and experimenting intensively with the topic of smell since 1990. She is unique in her approach to smells. She has developed a wide range of revolutionary interdisciplinary projects worldwide with smells based upon her own knowledge – forensic chemistry, chemical communication, sensory ecology, linguistics, and the visual art. Tolaas established the SMELL RE_searchLab Berlin in January 2004. Tolaas has unique skills in smell recognition, - analysis and – reproduction/replication. She has researched and experienced with smells in many ways and in multiple diverse contexts and for multiple purposes & formats. Her research and projects have won recognition through numerous national and international scholarships, honours, and prizes. She is very capable at collaborating intensively with those of other disciplines across the globe. Tolaas has shown her projects in many museums and institutions including MOMA, New York; NGV Melbourne; DIA Foundation, New York; CCA Singapore, Tate Modern London; Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; MORI Museum, Tokyo. She has worked with universities such as MIT, Nanyang Technical, Tsinghua, Harvard, and Oxford. She has built up several types of smell archives such as: Smell & Communication/ language; Smell & Coding, Smell & Anthropocene; Smell & Extinction; Smell & Sensory Ecology; Functional Smell Molecules. She is currently working on smell-molecule preservation /conservation archives such as: Cristobal Balenciaga Legacy; the World’s Oceans and World’s Forests; smell geofacts / artefacts /archives at The Metropolitan Museum , New York; smell heritage archive for the Pompeii Ruins; Bahrain Pearling Path & UNESCO. Tolaas’ collections of smell molecules and smell complex structures from 1990 and ongoing are including 15,000 smell recording samples and formulas.