The Scent of Amsterdam

Last Sunday, the 22nd of October 2017, I hosted another "Scent of Amsterdam" workshop at Mediamatic.

We were a beautiful group of 10 people, all of us interested in the sense of smell. The participants where design and art students, teachers and professional artists.

After boring them to hell ;) with a theoretical introduction on the physiology and anatomy of our olfactory system we went out for a smell walk! We had a small challenge, the rain. It made it harder for us to smell around, but hey, we managed! This time we sniffed out some green leaves, a trash can and a wet wooden wall. Then, Joel, one of the participants, took the lead and brought us to 3 new scented spots: red berries, bricks and a very wet collection of wooden pallets on the street.

This is the first time I experienced the smell walk with my eyes folded: I was amazed by the quickly growing sense of hearing. This made me thought maybe next time I should also give earplugs to the participants.

We collected a big variety of plants and objects to run the 2 different distillations.

Hydrodistillation: books & mushrooms.

Steam distillation: berries and burned earth.