Markéta Baňková

What does the hold of a merchant ship smell like in 1621?
What does the landscape of an undiscovered territory smell like?
What does the most sensual woman smell like?
What do stables, volcanic landscapes, or certain words smell like?
What do X-rays and space smell like?
Find out at the sniffing exhibition by perfumer, writer and science populizer.

We’re on a merchant ship in 1621 that got lost in a storm. Anchored off an unknown coast, the captain and his sailors set out to explore the land. Through a strange, intoxicating landscape, they reach a town at the foot of a volcano. However, in the local taverns and brothels they forget about the ship and their search for a port. A Czech prostitute, Matylda, confuses the captain with her sweet and sensual odour, so much so that he then tries to seek divine forgiveness in a monastery.

The exhibition reconstructs the scented topography of the past, placing us in a world that has subtly disappeared over the last few centuries. Gone, too, are its memorials. Today we live in a different aromatic space-time. The smell of exhaust fumes and chimney smoke are part of it. The smell of plastics and industrial products suffuses domestic interiors, textiles and subsequently the skin smell of detergents. Conventional perfumes today are more like, in the words of perfumer Mandy Aftel, “cleaning products”, which has changed their social meaning.

The aromatic world of the past was more raw. Perfumes also served experiential, spiritual, therapeutic and religious purposes. Through the smell of soil, animals, wildlife, agriculture, clean water and air, smoke from fires, and also the organic smell of smouldering, humans became more connected to their surroundings. Smell aided survival and hunting-gathering. A trace of this meaning has remained in our language (“This doesn’t smell right; he sniffs it out; he sticks his nose in everything; a whiff of opportunity; this thing stinks…”)

Markéta Baňková has created the smells of travelling through the world of the seventeenth century not only through the artist’s eyes, but also on the basis of historical data. There is an exceptional opportunity to smell the scents using some of the perfumery essences used for centuries, which are nowhere to be smelled today. Their use is banned in European perfumery because of the threat to the rare plants from which they are derived. The author has used them exclusively for the purpose of this exhibition, the authenticity of which would otherwise be difficult to convey. Some of the aromatic artworks are for sale, with a five-year maintenance service. They are for artistic experience only and are not intended for use on the skin.

Beyond that, however, four perfumes that the artist recently released as part of the launch of her niche perfume house, Space Fluid, are also for sale in the exhibition.

Please note: Enter at your own risk. Smell the scents from 25 cm from the neck of the bottle. Although the substances used are exclusively perfumery, it is possible that someone may have an allergic reaction to a natural substance they have not encountered before. Although the likelihood of this is very small, people with coughs, sensitive individuals or allergy sufferers are advised not to go to the exhibition. Try sniffing the bottles first and wait a while. Some fragrances are aromatherapeutic and may cause drowsiness or mood changes. Neither the author nor Space Fluid Ltd are responsible for any health complications. Please use the disposable gloves provided at the show so that the fragrances in the bottles are not contaminated by the odor of visitors. Please do not exhale into the neck of the bottles for the same reason. Always close the bottle necks quickly with the caps. Report any problems with caps etc. immediately.

For the purpose of legal protection, Space Fluid s.r.o. is the owner, seller of Markéta Baňková’s aromatic artworks, their service provider, perfume dealer and organizer of the exhibition to which you are invited with one scented breath.

Admission is free and for adults only.

Markéta Baňková

is an author, artist and experimenter combining various disciplines. In her bestseller The Magpie in the Realm of Entropy (awarded the Magnesia Litera Prize), she brought physics to the attention of readers in a literary form, while in her novel Maličkost (awarded the Czech Book Prize), she focused on biology and genetics. She is now working on botany and chemistry through her perfume project Space Fluid. In the 1990s she was a pioneer of the Internet and new technologies, writing the Internet novel Mesto.html, creating a map of New York called Nycmap.com and the Scribble project. However, her enthusiasm has waned somewhat with the spread of the Internet, and although she still uses technology, she is returning to traditional manual methods and communication outside of the online environment. You can’t send a scent via email or share it on Facebook, you have to physically encounter it. The Space Fluid project aims to restore to perfume the individuality of a work of art and the uniqueness of an artist’s handiwork. They are created not only to be worn, but also as an independent sensory experience that evokes emotions. In her lecture on the experimental novel Mesto.html in the 1990s, she wrote about books that we should not only read but also smell.

The Pleasure of Information

What would the world look like if humanity suddenly and permanently lost its sight?
Let’s try to imagine that for a moment.
Our civilization is a visually-based one. After sight, hearing is the most privileged sense; smell and touch are used less and less. Each sense prompts a different way of thinking and a different way of interacting with the world.
Sight and hearing allow us to perceive the world around us at distance – distance that mediagreatly increases, showing us events from far-away lands and different cultures. The news and social networks provide us with detailed coverage of events that, while affecting our minds, can make us feel cut off from them. Sight casts us in the role of voyeurs, watching events unfold but not being affected by them. In order to be able to process the flow of dramatic, even traumaticinformation (wars and disasters, famine and climate breakdown), we often choose emotional distance.

But if we perceived the world around us by smell and touch (as do some mammals related to us, such as the mole), we would have no choice but to be part of the situation under observation.
Since the sense of smell is the sense most closely associated with emotion and memory, would this produce a civilization that is less egocentric than the visually-oriented world? Probably yes. Olfaction cannot be transmitted at a distance; to smell is to be present. We would smell the gunpowder and the sweat and blood and fear of war victims. It would mix with our own scent. It would stick to us.

Perceiving information by smell – like hearing and touch – also requires a moment of focus and concentration and a tethering to the present. Whether it’s a hunter trying to pick up the scent trail of a quarry or a cat owner trying to track down the patch where the cat has peed in his apartment, we have to abandon other activities and concentrate our mind on sniffing out the target. What a contrast to the news on TV, which we can have on and passively listen to as a backdrop to our daily routine.

Although its potential does not change, our sense of smell gradually dulls. This is true for human culture over centuries, but also on a smaller, individual scale: a person will stop noticing a scent with which they are overly familiar. Contributing to this phenomenon at both scales is our polluted environment and the ubiquitous chemical fragrances in cleaning products, which may be pleasant but dull the delicacy of our sense of smell if we are exposed to them for a long time.

Usually, people think of smell as pleasant and unpleasant odour experiences – perfume on one side of the spectrum, excrement on the other. In evolutionary terms, however, the sense of smell did not evolve for humans to experience pleasant and unpleasant moments, but rather as a tool for acquiring information.

How much information, and of what kind, can a perfumer’s continuously-trained, sharpened-to-the-point nose provide over the years? Like a dog, the owner of such a nose may appear to have what is called a sixth sense. The sense of smell can pick up a range of information that is hidden even to the eye. The refined nose navigates the world according to a kind of invisible map that guides it not only in space, but also in time. Objects give off smells that flutter through space like invisible objects according to the flow of the wind. In them, sharply or more softly demarcated islands of more recent or closer events appear.

The owner of the trained nose can tell how successful another person’s day has been, whether he is carrying any illness, whether he drank alcohol or ate spicy food the day before, whether he was on a nature walk, at a restaurant or visiting a particular person, and also how long he was there, roughly. He can often tell whether a stranger lives in a large or small house, an old house or a new building. He or she can tell who owns pets, whether the home has a lot of (dusty) things, and sometimes can even guess how many other people and what gender and age live in the household. He or she will know whether the person likes to cook, whether they drink or smokeand what they wash their laundry in, and will also be able to hazard a good guess at theirtype of occupation.

In the past, witches and fortune tellers were often also collectors of medicinal and scented herbs. What if their divination skills were just due to a trained sense of smell?

The author of this exhibition believes that women can often pick out a man who is living an interesting and happy life by smelling him, and that his scent smells good to them. However, olfactory attraction to the opposite sex is generally associated with pheromones. The author, after testing pheromones, has come to believe that this supposed miracle does not work very well and believes that our sense of smell has evolved to detect more important parameters: what is essential is the experience of perceiving the rich, multilayered information it provides to our memory.

The exhibition is based on a story loosely inspired by the artist’s favourite book, Johan Fabricio’s Java Ho!: The Adventures of Four Boys Amid Fire, Storm and Shipwreck, which is set in the seventeenth century, a time that smelled more raw and animalistic than today and arguably a time of well-trained noses.
We might not have adventures like the characters of the novel today since the Earth has been mapped, but we are still able to discover and feel the sensation of the unknown through smell.

The story begins with a text, and a scent that develops this. Gradually the sentences become shorter and can seem like snippets out of context. The artist does not want the scents to become just an illustration of the literal text, but for the visitors to the exhibition to try to take them as the content of the story itself and to infer it with their own sense of smell.