All the senses collide
Wafting with nostalgia
Taking you back to
Places familiar
I recently had the privilege to visit the Kiran Nadar Museum with Taabeer, the Art and Discussion club of the English Department on October 25.
The ‘Smell Assembly’ is the culmination of Ishita Dey and Mohammad Sayeed’s year-long project, and brings together walks, collections and annotations of smells from three sites in the city: Majnu ka Tila, fish markets of Chittaranjan Park, ittr shops and spice market of Old Delhi. The exhibition follows trails of smell-work of Sakha cab drivers, Shahri Mahila Kamgar Union, sanitation workers, smell-workers of Gadodia market, manual scavengers, ittr makers and associated clusters.
According to the curator Akansha Rastogi, “Smell Assembly opens an anthropologist’s field diary in a contemporary art museum. It puts into focus the sensorial body as well as a researcher’s body purposefully wandering in the city, a body that maps as well as carries smell. The exhibition introduces a parcha from a fictional smell-workers union that re-imagines smell as the primary basis of reorganizing work and rate cards, and further invites to play and find one’s own temporary disposition or mizaaj through a smell game. Each collected smell translates into a micro-site with this spatial thinking and processing of research in an exhibitionary form, multiplying or displacing the primary sites of research and transporting viewers to various landscapes and memory-scapes through olfactory experience.”
The smell assembly as an installation truly challenged the notions of the visualization, manifestation, and the experience of art. For me, the groundbreaking idea of being able to recreate a person’s experience of visiting a place through its smells was revelatory. The implications of it are enlightening as they highlight social, cultural, and mental factors affecting a human experience.
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The exhibition inspired me to try the same thing in college, as well. Over the course of two days, I attempted to map the smells of the campus; however,I soon discovered that there is something constantly shifting about the way scents function. Each time I crossed Nescafe, for instance, I half expected to only notice the fragrance of a hot cup of coffee. Yet, I could not discount everything that was lingering in the peripheries: the smell of hot noodles, homemade tiffins, leaves, faint perfume. This threw me off, initially, as there was no one scent that I could pin down to the places within college.
A change of tactic was clearly required, and so, instead of assigning a specific scent to each location, I traced the colours I associated with the scents. Food, for instance, spelt comfort and warmth for me, and so I assigned it the colour yellow. This led to an interesting exercise, as the scents and emotions I associated with each colour were unique to me, and the way my friends experienced the same colours was wildly different. And so, this led me to the (highly inaccurate) map attached here- a motley of colours that I associate with the college campus. They represent a variety of smells and fragrances, and I leave it to the viewer to decide what they wish to see (smell?) in each one!
Written by Avani Solanki and Noor Sharma
Edited by Tinka Dubey
Featured Image by Avani Solanki
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