An Odor Artist's Vision of a Smelly Future

May 4, 2010 -- Sissel Tolaas is difficult to label. She's an artist, chemist, odor theorist and smell missionary. Now she can add "magazine curator" to her CV. The current issue of MONO.KULTUR, an arts quarterly published in Berlin, features 12 of the scents she has produced in her Berlin lab. All you need to do is scratch and sniff.

The Scandinavian smell expert, who has degrees in chemistry, art and language, is on something of a mission to change the way we think about our olfactory capabilities. She argues that an appreciation of our sense of smell can allow us to live our lives to their full potential. "We can be nothing without the nose," she told SPIEGEL ONLINE in an interview. "The moment we stop breathing we are dead. With every breath we take in thousands of molecules."

For 20 years, the Norwegian-born Tolaas has been engaged in researching odors, collecting an archive of some 6,700 smells in her West Berlin apartment and training her nose to not just detect scents but to remove her emotional baggage about notions of odors being good or bad. Her interdisciplinary research and conceptual approach has led her to put on art installations, work with universities on research projects and put her knowledge to commercial use.

Tolaas argues that our sense of smell is "completely undervalued" compared to other senses. We rarely understand the information that comes through our noses, she says, and we lack the language to describe what we experience. Yet the very way we relate to our surroundings and each other can be primarily through smell. "Tolerance doesn't start with looking and hearing, with skin color or religion but with the smell, the nose," she argues.