Odeuropa and the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies invite you to join us on the 15th & 16th of December for an online workshop on malodours as cultural heritage.
Sensorial perception is as much a cultural phenomenon as a physical and biological function. Fragrances, aromas, and the mouth-watering smells of foods are defining elements of our social perception, building memories, and situating us into particular cultural contexts. But, what about the unpleasant or foul odours? Heritage and museum initiatives tend to shy away from malodours, focusing on pleasant fragrances from the past, warping ideas about olfactory history. In this Odeuropa Workshop: Malodours as Cultural Heritage?, an interdisciplinary group of scholars and museum professionals will explore and challenge the topic of stench, dealing with the specifics of historicising malodours. The border between the malodorous and the pleasant is not only individually, but also collectively, culturally and historically defined. What do malodours tell us about transitions and advancements within urban, social, cultural, and environmental contexts? How can the sense of smell act as a measurement of analysis for histories of the past and present? How can we locate malodours, intangible by definition, within the cultural heritage sector and how can they be used as a storytelling technique?
Details:
Date: December 15-16, 2021 (9:45-17:00 CEST)
Streaming from: Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin
Organizers: EU-research network Odeuropa & Berlin Center for Cold War Studies (BKKK) of Leibniz-Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ)
Format: live and pre-recorded lectures
Participants: Open for virtual participation; live-stream link will be publicly available
Registration:
Please fill out this form to register for the event.
Full Programme:
Please click here to download the final programme as a PDF file.
Invited Speakers:
Ally Louks (University of Cambridge)
Ally Louks is currently a PhD student in English Literature: Criticism and Culture at the University of Cambridge. She holds a first class degree in English Literature from the University of Exeter and a Masters degree with distinction in Issues in Modern Culture from UCL. Her PhD research, entitled ‘Olfactory Ethics: Smell and Discrimination in Modernity’, examines the role of olfactory language and perception in the construction of personal and group alterity in interdisciplinary contexts.
Anton Philip van Harreveld (Guest Researcher at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences)
The scientific career of Anton Philip van Harreveld has focussed on quantitative description of odour and malodour since 1980. As convenor of a CEN European standardisation working group TC/264/WG2 ‘olfactometry’ he was closely associated with developing international standard methods for odour measurement to support environmental regulations to limit odour nuisance. He remains interested in human behaviour and smell and representing odour in numerical and semantic ways.
Aude Hendrick (Historian (PhD)), museologist and curator at the Sewer Museum,Brussels)
Aude Hendrick is a historian (PhD) and museologist and has been working as a curator of the Sewer Museum in Brussels since 2016.
Bodo Mrozek (Berlin Center for Cold War Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ))
Bodo Mrozek is a contemporary cultural historian currently working on a transnational olfactory history of the 20th century. He has published on sound history and popular culture and is the editor of “Sensory Warfare in the Global Cold War. Propaganda, Partition and Covert Operations” (coming out in 2022).
Caro Verbeek (Kunstmuseum, The Hague, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Dr. Caro Verbeek (1980) is an art historian, curator, maker and teacher with a focus on smell, touch, synaesthesia and recently rhythm. She is an education innovator both within museums, art academies and universities. Her aim is to (re-)construct a more inclusive and democratic history of art by re-narrating it from and through a sensory perspective. For this reason she is often described as an ‘artistic scholar’ or ‘academic performer’, a label she first resisted but now embraces. Since June 2021 she is also a curator of Mondrian & De Stijl at the Kunstmuseum The Hague, where she is developing more sensory approaches to abstract art. She just finished her fourth book “A small cultural history of the nose” which will appear in English next year.
Cecilia Bembibre (Odeuropa, University College London)
Cecilia Bembibre developed a framework to identify and preserve historic odours using a heritage science approach for her PhD project, Smell of Heritage. Working with The National Trust, St Paul’s Cathedral and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, she has preserved historic scents from a historic library, a 17th-century pot-pourri and the smell of mould in historic churches. Having previously researched smell at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, Cecilia is interested in an interdisciplinary approach to smell and the preservation of olfactory heritage. She also collaborates with industries exploring the potential of GC-O characterisation of historic odours. Cecilia is a Lecturer in Sustainable Heritage at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage and part of the Horizon 2020 project Odeuropa, working on the preservation, reconstruction and communication of European heritage smells.
Claire Dobbin (Freelance Museum Curator)
Claire Dobbin is a freelance museum curator and interpretation specialist, passionate about inclusive design and the creative use of collections to engage and develop audiences. She has worked and advised on a broad range of museum and heritage projects, in the UK and Middle East, with current exhibitions at The Museum of London Docklands and The Media Majlis in Qatar. She is a Trustee of Wiltshire Museum and a Lecturer in Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster. Her recent publications and conference contributions focus on the benefits and impact of multisensory visitor experiences.
Clara Muller (Nez, the olfactory magazine)
Art historian, critic, and curator, Clara Muller is pursuing research on the politics of breathing in contemporary art, the diversity of art and design practices using scent as a medium, as well as on the presence of smell in 19th and 20th century French literature.
Emily Cockayne (School of History, University of East Anglia)
Emily Cockayne is a cultural historian, focusing on interpersonal relationships, material culture, nuisances and domestic and street environments in England. I have three published books: Hubbub. Filth, Noise & Stench in England (2007), Cheek by Jowl. A History of Neighbours (2012), and Rummage: a History of the Things we have Reused, Recycled and Refused to let go (2020). I consider smells in various contexts in these publications. I am an Associate Professor in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia (UEA).
Inger Leemans (Odeuropa, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Inger Leemans is a professor of Cultural History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the principal investigator of the NL-Lab at the KNAW Humanities Cluster. Her research activity is concentrated on early modern cultural history (1500-1850), the history of emotion and smell, the history of knowledge, cultural economy, and digital humanities. She is the project lead of Odeuropa.
Jean-Thomas Tremblay (English Department, New Mexico State University)
Jean-Thomas Tremblay is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University. They are the authors of the forthcoming Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022) and, with Andrew Strombeck, a co editor of Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s (State University of New York Press, 2021). Their writing is tallied at http://jeanthomastremblay.me.
Josely Carvalho (Independent Artist)
Josely Carvalho is a multimedia artist, born in São Paulo and maintains studios in Rio de Janeiro and New York. In the last four decades, her artwork embraces several mediums and seeks to highlight memory, identity, women issues and social justice while consistently challenges frontiers between artist and public and art and politics.In 2019, she received the International Art and Olfaction Sadakichi Award in experimental olfactory artwork category for her installation Glass Ceiling: Resilience presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in São Paulo in 2018. Among her latest exhibits highlights are: Suspensio: An interruption in Time, at Art Olfactory Keller Gallery, New York, 2021; Diary of Smells: Anoxia, Harvestworks, Governors Island, New York 2019; Diary of Smells: Affectio at Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2019; Diary of Smells: Glass Ceiling at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo, Brazil, 2018.
Lara Salmon and Regina Mamou; Joes Segal (Independent artists, The Wende Museum of the Cold War, Los Angeles, California)
Research for the Bermuda Triangle (RBT) is the duo-collaborative of artists Lara Salmon and Regina Mamou. Together they create experience-based art events both nationally and abroad. RBT undertook their first scent-related project in 2018 when they began working with hydro-distillation in Marrakech, Morocco.
Liam Findlay (AromaPrime)
Liam is a consultant and designer for AromaPrime, a company which provides themed scents for educational and immersive venues. Past projects have involved everything from the design of a museum’s Egyptian mummy smell-pump to the creation of nostalgic, olfactory kits for people with dementia. AromaPrime’s customers include notable venues such as The British Museum and National Trust sites, as well as entertainment brands like The Dungeons and Madame Tussauds.
Lizzie Marx (Odeuropa, University of Cambridge)
Lizzie Marx is a member of Odeuropa, where she collaborates on mining olfactory imagery in digital collections, and its impact in museum and heritage organisations. She is also a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, where she is completing her dissertation, ‘Visualising Smell in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art’. In 2018–2019 she was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and she was the Research and Exhibition Assistant of ‘Fleeting – Scents in Colour’, the 2021 summer exhibition at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, about smell in seventeenth-century art, and co-author of the exhibition publication.
Mathias Zinnen (Odeuropa, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Department of Computer Science)
Mathias Zinnen studied Philosophy and Computer Science in Mainz, Berlin, and Erlangen. Currently, he is pursuing his Ph.D. in computer science at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. While studying philosophy, he was (and still is) particularly interested in the philosophy of science and epistemology. In the field of computer science, he is enthusiastic about machine learning, artificial intelligence, and their applications. For the Odeuropa project, he works on the automatic recognition of olfactory references in historical artworks.
Michael Philipp (Museum Barberini, Potsdam)
Michael Philipp is the chief curator at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam.
Nadjib Achaibou (Symrise Mexico)
Nadjib Achaibou is a Symrise Perfumer creating consumer products in Latin America. He is passionate about using fragrance as a storytelling tool in concerts, theatre and multisensory virtual reality.
Raphael Troncy (Odeuropa, EURECOM)
Raphael Troncy is an associate professor in computer science in the Data Science Department of EURECOM. His research interests include knowledge engineering, ontology modeling, knowledge graph, natural language processing and understanding and recommender systems. He is applying his research in the Cultural Heritage sector as well as with the culture, tourism, creative and media industries.
Rebeca Ibáñez Martín (Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences)
Rebeca Ibáñez Martín is an anthropologist and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar. She focuses on the topics of food and agricultural multispecies relations, and waste and wastewater infrastructural innovations.
Ruben Verwaal (Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University)
Ruben Verwaal is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, and curator of the medical collections at Erasmus MC, Rotterdam. His research focuses on early modern medicine, deafness, and bodily fluids. He recently published ‘Bodily Fluids, Chemistry and Medicine in the 18th-century Boerhaave School’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and ‘Fluid Deafness: Earwax and Hardness of Hearing in Early Modern Medicine’, Medical History 65 (2021), 366–383.
Shivani Kapoor (O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India)
Shivani Kapoor is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Writing Studies, O.P. Jindal Global University. She has a doctorate in Political Science from Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her work is located at the intersection of caste, sensory politics and labour and examines the relationship between caste and the senses in the leather industry in contemporary India.
Sofia Ehrich (Odeuropa, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences)
Sofia Collette Ehrich is a sensory art historian and curator of scent experiences. As a Los Angeles native, she studied art history at University California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She recently finished her Masters at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in Comparative Arts and Media studies where she wrote her thesis, Orchestrating the Senses onto Virtual Reality Narratives: Confronting the limitations of media and exploring the importance of crossmodality within virtual digital environments. Her research interests include approaches, challenges, and limitations to multisensory storytelling within varying environments but especially in cultural heritage institutions. She is also interested in detecting the visual representations of the senses (especially smell) in art history and connecting these with sensory impressions in the museum. Within the Odeuropa project, she will assist in organizing and curating events and exhibitions around smell.
Stephanie Weismann (University of Vienna)
With a background in cultural studies, comparative literature and Slavic studies, Stephanie Weismann is currently working on an olfactory urban history of the Polish city of Lublin in the 20th century. The study is sniffing out different odours and malodours that defined the city’s atmosphere and asks how political, social, cultural and economic processes and tensions in Eastern Central Europe have found expression in olfactory experiences.
Tasha Marks (Independent Artist)
Tasha Marks is an award-winning artist, food historian and founder of AVM Curiosities, a creative practice that addresses how the senses can be incorporated into the gallery and museum space. Since founding her practice in 2011, she has worked with a number of high profile cultural institutions in the UK, including; The British Museum, The National Gallery and the V&A. Projects range from olfactory curation and scented installations to interactive lectures and limited-edition confectionery.
Tina Asmussen (German Mining Museum Bochum, Ruhr University of Bochum)
Tina Asmussen is an assistant professor of early modern mining history at the Ruhr University of Bochum and head of the mining history research department at the German Mining Museum Bochum. Previously she held an Ambizione fellowship by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Chair for Science Studies at ETH Zurich and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her main research interests are early modern history of science and knowledge, environmental and economic history, especially the history of natural resources. Currently she is working on a book project entitled: “Subterranean OEconomies: Mining and Resource Cultures in Early Modern Europe.”
Victoria-Anne Michel (Odeuropa, Anglia Ruskin University)
Victoria-Anne Michel is a PhD student in the European H2020 project, Odeuropa. She is interested in understanding how people experience smells in a space and how these smellscapes participate in making sense of place. She has a background in Social and Human sciences and specialized in Urbanism for her Master degree at the Institute of Political Studies in Bordeaux, France. She also completed a professional training in Perfumery and holds a certificate of “Olfactory Designer” from Cinquième Sens Institute in Paris.
William Tullett (Odeuropa, Anglia Ruskin University)
William Tullett is an Associate Professor in Sensory History and a researcher on the Odeuropa project. His work has focussed on the sensory history of the west from the 1600s to the present. His first book, Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense, was published with Oxford University Press in 2019.