Artwork title: Omokagé
Curator: Yoko IWASAKI (Kyoto-saga art college)
Artists: Yasuaki MATSUMOTO (Kyoto-saga University of Arts) and
Laurence Fanuel（L'Atelier de Rosa Rose）

As a starting point for this research an exhibition with an artist’s talk was presented in Kyoto, Japan:

A journey in time and space with scents: Unchanging scents, changing scenes.

Omokagé Kyoto/Aix-en-Provence
3rd October 2020 - 28th October 2020
10:00am-17:00pm
(Artist talk: 14:00pm 3rd October 2020) 

Shoyeido Kunjyukan 
1F Shogin Lobby, Karasuma Nijo, Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto 604-0857 Japan

The exhibition formed part of the cultural program titled Nuit Blanche, the 2020 theme for which was ‘flux’. In interpreting this, a free traveller wandering from city to city, from time to time was imagined for the exhibition. We posed the question, how can your heart be unleashed if you can smell the scent and mentally travel in time and space freely while it is hard to come and go physically with the restrictions on movement imposed by the Cpvid-19 global pandemic? In seeking to answer this we also aim to propose a new way of traveling. 

Inspired by A Traveller in Time (Uttley, 1939), we contrast ‘unchanging scents’ with ‘changing scenes’. In this book, the young heroine arrives at an old 16th century manor house in the English countryside. The herbs, dishes, clothes and furnishings there are imbued with a scent that has not changed for 400 years, inducing the girl to make trips in time across the centuries. She does this seemingly without anxiety as, although the visible scenes change between the present and those from 400 years ago, the scent surrounding her does not change at all.

In the greater span of time a person's life is ephemeral, even if we live to be a 100, although there is the sense that we are an accumulation of the spirits of our ancestors going back for centuries. ‘Nostalgic scent’ has the power to transport us beyond our immediate sense to the past, and even to a time we could not have experienced.

It is also possible to perceive scent spatially as we travel. Modern transport has made it easier to visit different countries. However, it may be possible that the smell and scenery of a land not previously visited could still induce nostalgic feelings: mountains, seas, and people's activities may have a fundamental smell signatures that might be commonly perceived. With this notion in mind, we will investigate how the combination of smelling and seeing can inspire familiarity with, and potentially longing for, a location not previously visited.

The exhibition to commence this research was held at Shoyeido, a long-established Kyoto business specialising in incense derived from herbs for nearly 300 years. In addition to the ‘unchanging scent’ of Kyoto and how it relates to a changing scene, the exhibition combines the scent and scenery of Aix-en-Provence, a significant place of herb cultivation and the development of perfume in France, with the intention that viewers should enjoy the implied journey in time and space induced by the scent.

Grant:

JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research 20H04443 ("Basic research on smell-scape as a concept of tourism"), 20H01223 ("Construction of a reminiscence method program using "nostalgic smell" and art by interdisciplinary research). 

See also article: Olfaction and its Impact on Train Travellers Well-being in Japan  

Related Artworks

Viola Odorata, which explores temporal change in odour perception related to a narrative derived from a letter dated 1673.

soranonioï, a journey of space and time with scents