Paul Sullivan visits the Berlin lab of Sissel Tolaas, the world’s leading smell expert…
It’s difficult not to be impressed by Sissel Tolaas. Born between Iceland and Norway, she was educated in Poland, Russia and Scandinavia, speaks nine languages (including Russian, Polish, English and German in addition to her native Icelandic and Norwegian) and has graduate degrees in chemistry, art, and language—oh, and an undergraduate degree in mathematics.
In the decade or so that she’s been living and working in Berlin, she has become the world’s leading expert in smell. Straddling the upper echelons of commerce, art, science, her work can involve anything from attending United Nations Climate Change conferences, advising on medical projects or creating provocative artworks, such as those she’s exhibited previously at NYC’s MoMA, Liverpool’s Tate Gallery and Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof.
The crux of her work, though, lies in her research lab, located inside an elegant, turn-of-the-century house in Wilmersdorf. Funded by International Flavours and Fragrances (IFF), Tolaas’ commercial clients include Adidas, Comme des Garçons, Ikea and Daimler Chrysler—yet she has never manufactured a bottle of perfume herself.
Her stated mission is beyond the world of perfume: it’s to help the world reclaim its olfactory systems, especially here in the “smell-blinded” West. The thousands of smell samples that are archived in her lab are aimed at exploring and uncovering (rather than camouflaging) the world’s odorous realities, an unflinching collection that includes sweat, toys, rotting bananas and dog poop.
Tolaas’ exhibitions have not been without controversy. In a show at the Foundation Cartier in Paris, she simulated the smell of the city by capturing the aroma of ashtrays and slaughterhouses. With her 2006 exhibit “the FEAR of Smell — the Smell of FEAR” at MIT’s Visual Arts Center, she synthetically rendered the smells of men prone to acute, chronic fear, creating special “scratch & sniff” panels that visitors could touch to release the respective odours.
Would you describe yourself more as a scientist or an artist?
I’d call myself a professional in-betweener [laughs]. Some people call what I do art and others call it science, but I’m really working between them all. I collect molecules and do experiments and the perfume industry uses them as a catalyst for the industry. My aim is to provide a unique knowledge about smell, and combat this idea that they are there to provide camouflage or corrupt reality. A lot of the work in the odour industry is scientific, but a great…