Olfactivism

Urban areas feature olfactory palimpsests – layers of scent affected by weather, season, and human conduct. Such a palimpsest hints at the mixture of regimes influencing the atmosphere, from municipal policies and neighborhood activities to corporate practices and environmental regulations. Smells evidence the broader sphere of political decision-making, social priorities, competing interests, and varying levels of enforcement and care. The city thus constitutes a prime battleground for olfactory politics. This chapter focuses on artists’ projects that respond to situations in which negative smells portend social and environmental problems. These works not only demonstrate the activist potential within olfactory art – olfactivism – they also exemplify a genre of progressive artistic practice that focuses attention on the risks percolating in the air while employing that very air as the medium for critical interrogation. Through performances, community and relational works, landscape interventions, distillations, and technological hacks, artists since the 1970s have adopted a wide range of means to address the challenge of smells antagonistic to health and well-being. By linking odors to wider issues of power and ethics, I discuss three main olfactivist strategies used to impact and improve scents in the city: abjection, remediation, and empowerment.