I came across the coolest book ever tonight while doing research for an exhibit I am planning in the Spring. The book is called, If There Ever Was: an exhibition of extinct and impossible smells. The book is only half of it of course - it exists to accompany the exhibition of the same name where fourteen scents were re-created:
“Like a cabinet of intangible curiosities, their forms are drawn from disparate stories throughout history for which few, if any, objects remain. And although it would be easy to pass the exhibition off as a work of pure fantasy—the product of an over-active perfumer’s imagination—beneath the olfactory theatricality lies a serious scientific basis” - James Wong, botanist at Botanic Gardens Conservation International, UK
The book itself (which can be purchased here), is a scratch-n-sniff book of 14 impossible smells, which include: the surface of the sun, communism, surrender, and a meteorite (just to name a few). I fucking want this book so bad. Even more, I want to SMELL it (alas, I cannot….but I will subject all of my friends to it for sure) I found the list of all of the 14 scents here - my two favorite descriptions are these:
Body Odor - On December 28, 1989, a slim young woman named Susanne Böden was handing out leaflets in East Berlin with her little sister. The leaflets promoted free speech for citizens of the Deutsche Democratic Republic. Shortly after she started handing them out, Susanne was arrested by the Stasi, or East German secret police. She stood trial at Stasi headquarters.
in East Berlin and was served with a caution. Before being released, the Stasi gave her a square of fabric to wipe against the back of her neck. This fabric was then kept by the Stasi in a sealed jar with her name on it. A person’s body odour is as distinctive and traceable as a fingerprint. The Stasi tracked the movements of suspected dissenters with trained sniffer dogs. To get the scent of their suspects, the Stasi employed a variety of methods such as breaking into apartments and stealing dirty clothes or sitting suspects in a heated room for questioning. The Stasi would then save a patch of fabric from this chair’s upholstery that had absorbed the
suspect’s body odour. The Berlin Wall fell within months of Susanne’s trial. During the ensuing
celebrations Stasi Headquarters were ransacked. Inside a small room at the headquarters, revellers found hundreds of jars labelled with people’s names and stuffed with bits of fabric.
The scent of surrender- Incense had many practical uses in times of ancient warfare. It was often lit during battles as a way of gaining favour from the gods of war and strength. Before the tradition of waving the white flag of surrender, burning a specific blend of incense over the walls of a city was also an indication of defeat. Through modern day Israel, Syria, and Egypt,
archaeologists have discovered clay reliefs depicting the presentation of the censer (incense burner) as a form of surrender. Commanders of cities such as Ascalon, besieged by the Egyptians during the reign of Rameses II, held a censer stuffed with a combination of storax, myrrh, frankincense, and mastic over the city walls. The smell of the city’s surrender would
then be carried on the wind to the advancing army
I was trying to imagine what impossible scents I would like to re-create if I could - maybe the smell of Vermeer’s studio, thick with the stench of oil paint and wine….or the smell of some WWII RAF Bomber jacket (I can only imagine its stories)….the scent of my grandmother baking her much loved Italian cookies. I wish I could have a hundred jars filled with these things - smells I will never experience, but could at least visually ‘own’ and they would include the most beautiful inscriptions detailing what was captured inside.
(Image: Lisa Wassman)
