You Smell!
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CONTEXT
self–initiated; field site: Eindhoven during DDW 2025
CONCEPT, PRODUCTION
Miriam Reihl
YEAR
2025
You Smell! is an urban olfactory intervention that investigates smell as a social trace in public space. Tear-off posters infused with scent are dispersed across the city, generating smell trails that circulate through everyday movement. Each torn piece carries a scent, and whoever takes it redistributes it, producing invisible traces that link strangers through shared olfactory encounters.
The project examines how public space is continuously and collectively marked through bodily emissions that remain largely unacknowledged. It positions smell as an overlooked mode of communication: diffuse, involuntary, and difficult to control. By foregrounding scent as a medium, the intervention challenges vision-centred understandings of urban interaction and introduces an alternative, multisensory reading of proximity, presence, and exchange.
Operating at the threshold between perception and awareness, the work explores how smells move, fade, and reappear, and how they connect memories to places and moments. It asks how attention to olfactory traces might reframe social relations in the city, not as fixed encounters, but as dispersed, temporal, and collectively produced conditions.
The project examines how public space is continuously and collectively marked through bodily emissions that remain largely unacknowledged. It positions smell as an overlooked mode of communication: diffuse, involuntary, and difficult to control. By foregrounding scent as a medium, the intervention challenges vision-centred understandings of urban interaction and introduces an alternative, multisensory reading of proximity, presence, and exchange.
Operating at the threshold between perception and awareness, the work explores how smells move, fade, and reappear, and how they connect memories to places and moments. It asks how attention to olfactory traces might reframe social relations in the city, not as fixed encounters, but as dispersed, temporal, and collectively produced conditions.
