Event 3: Diary of Smells

This event was really unique and impressive. It was about the art of smell, which I had never heard of before. When I walked into the exhibition room, an aroma was blowing into my nose. I met Professor Vesna there and she introduced me to the artist of this exhibition, Josely Carvalho. She was such a nice lady that she explained her special work to me. She was the most interesting artist that I have ever met. She dedicated herself into a unique and unprecedented artistic expression, the smell. Nowadays most arts are visual and audible such as paintings, photographies and music. However, art of smell was introduced to my knowledge of art for the first time.

Josely started the work with smell in memory of her grandmother when her grandmother once said to her: go take a bus if you don't want the smell of catfish. She was using certain smells to remind her some certain memories. She said that when something happens to people, they must have feelings and emotions about the happening. She wanted to create smell that can represent this certain happening in people's memories. Since smell is physiological, when people smell some familiar odors, physiologically they have some unclear images of old memories appear in their minds. That is how the art of smell works. So Josely was working with chemists in labs to created different smells to help remind her different memories and emotions. These smells can exactly correspond to certain memories and emotions. When we smell them, we can immediately think of the happy or sad moments we had before.

This is a very amazing combination of art and chemistry. Even though these odors smell like perfume, actually they are just used to represent memories, emotions and stories. Employing modern chemistry, Josely created all the exact smells that she had in her memories and also created a special artistic expression. She took the advantages of chemistry and physiology to make people feel their emotions and find their memories through smells.  To find out various combinations of art and science is what we are looking for during the entire class.