Olfactormativity - Exploring The Intervening Performativity Of Smell
Projektleitung: Univ.-Prof. Dr.in Silke Felber
Projektteam: Dr.in Freda Fiala (Postdctoral Researcher), Dr.in Julia Ostwald (Postdoctoral Researcher), Antonia Karácsonyi LL.B. (Project Management)
Projektpartner*innen: Prof. Dr. Jim Drobnick (Ontario College of Art & Design Toronto, Canada) Ass. Prof. Lindsey French (Department of Art, University of Maine, USA), Prof. Dr. Hsuan L. Hsu 徐旋 (Geography & Cultural Studies Graduate Groups, Critical Theory Designated Emphasis, University of California at Davis, USA), Prof. Dr. Dorotheé King (Arts and Design Education Institute, University for Arts and Design Basel, Switzerland), Prof. Dr. Lars Koch (Media Studies and Modern German Literature, Technical University of Dresden, Germany), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Marco Tullio Liuzza (Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione – DPSS, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy), PD Dr. Helene Loos (Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany), Alanna Lynch (Artist, Berlin), Gwenn-Aël Lynn (Artist, Chicago and Paris), Prof. Dr. Anna Menini (Neurobiology, Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati Trieste (SISSA), Italy), Clara Muller (Olfactory art historian and curator, Sancerre, France), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Debra Riley Parr (Art and Art History Department, Columbia College Chicago, USA), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Brandon Woolf (Department of English, NYU, USA)
Art der Förderung: ERC Consolidator Grant
Projektlaufzeit: Oktober 2024 bis September 2029
Institut: Institute of Fine Arts and Cultural Studies
Olfactormativity
Exploring The Intervening Performativity Of Smell
Smells have a profound and often underestimated impact on human experience. They can evoke memories, shape emotions, and influence behavior in ways that are both subtle and powerful. With their unique ability to establish or unsettle routines, odours challenge perceptions, and provoke new ways of thinking. At the same time, they can deeply stigmatize or even (re-)traumatize, entrenching social divisions or triggering visceral reactions tied to violence and abuse. Their ephemeral nature allows smells to move between the intimate, the intrasubjective, and the collective, engaging deeply with dimensions of identity, remembrance, and space. In this way, smells carry the potential to both uphold and subvert social norms, offering a sensory medium for dynamics of control, resistance, and transformation.
Building on this unique potential, OLFAC investigates the intervening performativity of smell at the intersection of arts and politics. The project explores how olfactory techniques and technologies are employed in artistic as well as in governmental contexts. Central to OLFAC is the notion that smell can stigmatize, but it can also help us “unlearn” ingrained social norms, opening up new pathways for reflection and transformation. By exploring how odours interact with and reshape our perceptual habits, OLFAC aims to trace the ways in which the olfactory can challenge systems of power and identity. With the investigation of the transformative potential of olfaction, OLFAC opens new perspectives on the sensory dimensions of societal change.
OLFAC is a highly transdisciplinary endeavor, bringing together insights from arts, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, psychology, neurobiology, and chemistry. Its goal is to develop a theory of olfactory performativity—olfactormativity—that redefines the role of smell as a critical force in the interplay of politics, aesthetics, and the senses.
