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Accepted Contribution
Contribution short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research on olfactory belonging and contested scents in urban publics, our exhibition intervention seeks to create a scentful, reflective space for audiences to contemplate the social life of smells and their capacity to engender politics.
Contribution long abstract
Odours and scents are fleeting and ephemeral, which poses methodological challenges in terms of articulation and representation. And yet, they are also material, effective, and, most importantly, constitutive of relationships, which require scholarly attention. By focusing on olfactory media, inherently out of focus, our contribution highlights an often-neglected sensory impression, while also recognising its entanglement with other senses.
Our main aim with this intervention is to create a scentful, reflective space for audiences to contemplate the social life of smells and their capacity to engender politics. Whether evoking memories, inspiring a field poem as a pathway to other worlds, embodying the precarious labor of migrants in the global perfume market, or manifesting hygiene in pandemic times, scents and smells, we argue, are important to think with in sensory ethnography, but also for the critique of contemporary power structures.
Our respective case studies investigate different dimensions of this: Mayıs Tokel’s ethnographic research in Berlin investigates scents and smell in relation to memory, migration and questions of belonging and othering. Ilke Imer’s research in Turkey follows the (im)materiality of rosely scents and their widespread use for affective governing by opposing socio-political actors. Claudia Liebelt’s multi-sited research on the perfume industry traces the transforming meanings and consumption of scented products, such as kolonya – Turkish for Eau de Cologne – in Turkey and its diaspora. We aim to engage the audience by using a rose-scented oil diffuser and displaying research materials, including one ethnographer’s multisensory field diary, and a selection of fragrances. We also wish to raise methodological questions: How to sense and articulate our own and our research partners’ olfactory affects and memories, often overlooked in everyday life? How to make sense of olfactory affect as the invisible resonance of unruly odours?
Out of Focus. Un/Commoning Curatorial Practices through Multimodal Engagements
Session 1