Sissel Tolaas — The Science of Smell
Sissel Tolaas — The Science of Smell
Sissel Tolaas has smelled fear. Not metaphorically — she collected sweat samples from men experiencing genuine terror, isolated the molecules responsible for the specific smell of fear, and reproduced it as a pigment embedded in gallery walls. Visitors, leaning close to look, would smell fear before they understood why.
This is the nature of Tolaas's practice: rigorous, scientific, fundamentally interested in what smell carries that other senses cannot. She has documented the smell of money (different currencies, different economies, different eras). She has mapped the olfactory identity of specific cities. She has preserved smells that no longer exist.
The wine connection is not ornamental — it is structural. Wine is smell, more than it is taste. The olfactory system processes most of what we call flavour. The vocabulary of wine tasting — cassis, wet stone, pencil shavings, truffle, forest floor — is a vocabulary of smell, borrowed and extended. Tolaas has spent her career asking what that vocabulary means scientifically, philosophically, culturally.
The conversation The Léger Guide wants: what does smell carry that language can barely hold? What is the relationship between smell memory and identity — why do certain wines carry us to specific places and moments? And what does the science of olfaction tell us about why wine matters, at a level deeper than taste?
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id. Sit amet commodo nulla facilisi nullam vehicula ipsum a arcu. Placerat orci nulla pellentesque dignissim enim sit amet venenatis urna.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id. Sit amet commodo nulla facilisi nullam vehicula ipsum a arcu. Placerat orci nulla pellentesque dignissim enim sit amet venenatis urna.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id. Sit amet commodo nulla facilisi nullam vehicula ipsum a arcu.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id. Sit amet commodo nulla facilisi nullam vehicula ipsum a arcu. Placerat orci nulla pellentesque dignissim enim sit amet venenatis urna.
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024
Fringed jacquard cardigan
The Léger Guide - June 3, 2024