Sissel Tolaas: Collecting and Reconstructing Smells to Explore Bodies and Cities

“What if my sense of smell became the way I understand the world?”
Sissel Tolaas

In Sissel Tolaas’s work, touching a museum’s white wall and bringing that hand to the nose becomes a way of experiencing art. Even when no one stands before us, smells collected from bodies and reconstructed can evoke another person’s presence. Her materials are not limited to flowers and trees. Sweat, the air of a city and traces left in clothing also offer information through which to understand the world.

The key to understanding Tolaas lies less in the quantity of unusual smells she has collected than in the work of collecting them anew and bringing them to people elsewhere. What should be retained? How does perception change when we read an explanation first, rather than smelling something without prior knowledge? Her research and artworks create situations in which using our noses allows us to reconsider our habitual judgments.

Contents

Key facts
From an interest in air to the study of smell
1. Growing up outdoors in Norway, and questioning breath
2. Collecting in the 1990s and establishing a laboratory in 2004
How smells are collected, analysed and preserved
1. From preserving the source itself to recording its components
2. What the collection’s numbers actually count
Smelling bodies on a wall: work around fear
Melbourne’s history as a touch-and-smell memory game
Reconstructing extinct flowers’ smells through collaboration
RE________: encountering your own response before an explanation
Considering a wearer through molecules left in clothing
What can we learn beyond good and bad smells?
References

Key facts

Name: Sissel Tolaas
Practice: smell research; collection, analysis and reconstruction; art using the sense of smell
Origin and base: born in Norway; based in Berlin, Germany
Research base: SMELL RE_searchLab Berlin, established in 2004 with support from fragrance company IFF
Her own updates: Instagram @sssl_berlin

She describes her work as both artistic practice and research into smell. She also calls herself a “professional in-betweener”: a way of describing work that moves between chemistry, language, visual art and other fields. Although she uses fragrance technology, the questions she asks cannot be explained solely in terms of designing pleasant perfumes.

From an interest in air to the study of smell

Growing up outdoors in Norway, and questioning breath

Tolaas grew up on Norway’s west coast and loved spending time outdoors. Childhood asthma restricted her activities, but also prompted an interest in invisible air and the act of breathing. Air cannot be seen, yet is essential to life. That interest developed into an investigation of the smells around her.

Her studies in mathematics, chemistry, languages and visual art offered ways of approaching a subject that did not fit comfortably within a single discipline. Chemistry became a means of investigating what happens in the air; linguistics offered ways to think about speaking of the invisible. Art became a place to carry these questions beyond the laboratory and encounter people’s responses.

Collecting in the 1990s and establishing a laboratory in 2004

During the 1990s, Tolaas travelled for seven years, collecting, classifying and recording smells. Using places, encounters and events as reference points, she wrote down what defined each smell for her. Her knowledge of language helped her put an invisible subject into words. Later, with IFF’s support, she established a smell laboratory in Berlin in 2004.

She does not attribute her ability simply to an exceptional nose at birth. In a 2021 conversation, she described a daily routine of training by smelling molecules and chemicals in the morning, before doing anything else. She said she took small training tools with her when travelling, too.

“It’s not that I’m born with massive skill to smell. Not at all.”
Sissel Tolaas

These words suggest an attitude that treats smelling as a skill to practise, rather than placing it at a distance as a special gift. For her, both time with molecules in the laboratory and time in the field, where people and places actually exist, sustain the work.

How smells are collected, analysed and preserved

From preserving the source itself to recording its components

In her early archive, physical objects that emitted smells were placed in metal containers and vacuum-sealed. The containers were labelled with information such as location, context, date, time and language. Later, access to technologies for recording smells meant she no longer had to keep bringing the physical sources back to the laboratory. Preservation expanded from keeping collected objects to retaining information for reconstruction.

Tolaas first investigates a place with her own nose, then decides whether to collect samples using instruments. In the method she describes, portable devices capture molecules emitted by a source, and laboratory chemists analyse them to identify the components. She uses the resulting data to reconstruct the smell chemically, as closely as possible to what was recorded.

One technology used in this work is headspace sampling, a method of collecting volatile components from the air around a subject for analysis. In a 2020 conversation, she explained how access to IFF’s research and development departments and equipment supported this work.

Molecular data are retained for each collection and recording, and added to archives covering cities, bodies, oceans, nature and biodiversity, among other subjects. The reconstructed smells are then detached from their original locations and placed in other media. Removing an explanation of what visitors are smelling is itself part of the method for engaging their perceptions.

“Smell is a means: what matters is the purpose; mine is tolerance.”
Sissel Tolaas

What the collection’s numbers actually count

A March 2025 profile by the Schering Stiftung described the collection as containing 15,000 “smell samples and formulas” and also mentioned 55 SmellScapes. The same profile referred to work preserving the smells of oceans and forests, as well as a smell-heritage archive for the ruins of Pompeii. These are the figures and activities reported at that particular time.

The early metal containers, individual molecules, complex smell structures and reconstructed smells are not interchangeable units. The number cannot be reinterpreted as 15,000 different urban smells bottled up. Tolaas’s archives comprise overlapping records of objects, data and formulas, from which works are assembled in response to different questions.

Smelling bodies on a wall: work around fear

The FEAR of smell—the smell of FEAR uses body odour as material for considering our distance from other people. Mediamatic’s 2006 account describes research begun in 2005 involving 20 men from different backgrounds with severe phobias. When they sensed fear approaching, they used a device under the arm and sent the smell information to Tolaas, who reconstructed the smell of their sweat in Berlin.

For exhibition, the reconstructed smells were enclosed in microscopic capsules, mixed into an odourless binding material and incorporated into a wall. Touch released the smells. This is different from simply applying actual human sweat to the wall.

The work was also shown in Sensorium: Part I at the MIT List Visual Arts Center from 12 October to 31 December 2006. The official materials listing identifies artificially reconstructed sweat and a synthetic binder. Rubbing the wall in an almost empty room released the smell while also leaving traces of visitors’ touch.

Visitors respond to smell before facing a visible body. They must also approach the wall and move their hands. The experience involves not only the nose but also bodily behaviour: how close are we willing to come to another person? This is not a work to read as proof that fear has been isolated as a single molecule.

Melbourne’s history as a touch-and-smell memory game

A representative work dealing with a city is SmellScape Melbourne_PastPresentPast, made for the 2017 NGV Triennial. The National Gallery of Victoria’s official introduction describes 20 different Melbourne smells presented as a “smell landscape” that visitors can touch and smell. Pleasant and unpleasant smells are both included, and visitors are invited to consider what each might be.

The work uses reconstructed real smells and abstract smell codes to evoke memories connected with the city’s past and present, and to create new ones. The exhibition labels explain a system in which visitors match smells in objects associated with numbers and letters, then place the letters in the corresponding numbered positions to form words. Following the four walls in sequence produces a phrase.

“Challenging people to use their noses gives them new methods and means to understand the world.”
Sissel Tolaas

The abstract objects do not disclose the answer through appearance alone. Visitors must remember a smell, recognise it elsewhere and work out the correspondences. The exhibition is designed to make people exercise memory through their bodies, rather than simply receive a written account of the city’s history.

Reconstructing extinct flowers’ smells through collaboration

Resurrecting the Sublime is a collaboration between Tolaas, artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and the Ginkgo Bioworks team led by Christina Agapakis. First exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2019, the project uses the smells of flowers lost through human activity to consider extinction and the histories of the places in which those flowers lived.

The Ginkgo team extracted tiny amounts of DNA from specimens of three flowers in the Harvard University Herbaria, then predicted and resynthesised gene sequences that may have encoded enzymes involved in producing aromatic compounds. Drawing on those results, Tolaas reconstructed the flowers’ smells in the laboratory using identical or comparable smell molecules. This was not a matter of extracting the original historical scent intact from preserved plant specimens.

The collaboration was also exhibited at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. One flower considered there, Hibiscadelphus wilderianus, was native to Maui, Hawaii. Colonial-era cattle ranching destroyed its forest habitat, and its last tree was found dying in 1912. The work connects not only with the flower, but also with a lost place and the human actions that changed it.

Even if researchers can investigate which molecules might have been present, the quantities of the individual components have been lost. In Ginsberg’s installation, fragments of smell mingle in space. The work is not structured to present a single, exact smell, nor does it bring the living plant back. It offers an experience of both what reconstruction can approach and what can no longer be recovered.

RE________: encountering your own response before an explanation

At RE________, held at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museet from 8 October to 30 December 2021, codes took the place of explanatory artwork labels. Titles and detailed information were gathered in the final room. Visitors could form their own impressions first, or explore after reading the information.

Responding to the museum’s location and architecture, works were made or reconfigured for the exhibition. From 16 September to 30 December 2022, it moved to the ICA in Philadelphia, where it opened as an exhibition of 20 works. This was an approach that adapted to the venue, rather than merely transporting the same contents in their containers.

At the ICA, one installation carried the smell of Norway’s west coast into the gallery using fans activated in response to storms there. Blocks and stones imbued with smells could evoke personal memories while also prompting conversation. Before looking to an explanation for the correct answer, visitors were encouraged to notice what a smell brought to mind and what it made them want to talk about.

Considering a wearer through molecules left in clothing

At Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 10 May to 2 September 2024, smell research addressed the limits of experiencing fragile garments through sight alone. The exhibition used conservation analysis and a range of technologies to reactivate clothing’s sensory dimensions. Tolaas was responsible for smells accompanying selected exhibits.

Molecules collected from a dress worn by Denise Poiret informed a scratch-and-sniff wall. Elsewhere, smells collected from garments were released through tubes, or presented in glass vessels mounted at different heights. Even with the same collected material, the form of presentation changes according to how the body is invited to approach it.

“I’m not perfuming spaces,”
Sissel Tolaas

She describes the work as examining garments with conservators and attending to molecular information that bears traces of the lives lived in them. Rather than adding a pleasant fragrance to suit a garment, she enables visitors to receive the information beneath an object’s surface in another way.

What can we learn beyond good and bad smells?

Smelling in multiple dimensions, a 2012 paper by Tolaas and Agapakis, questions the reduction of smell to a simple pleasant–unpleasant axis and argues for an approach spanning chemistry, neuroscience, aesthetics and the social sciences. In her exhibitions, too, analysing components and asking how people perceive a smell are distinct questions that overlap.

Walls carrying the smell of sweat, a game exploring urban memory, flowers whose proportions of aromatic components have been lost, and molecules collected from clothing: what connects them is not a policy of turning everything into a pleasant fragrance. It is work that rearranges the conditions of smelling, asking what we know, which explanations we believe and what we have avoided.