Anosmia, lives without a sense of smell, 17 to 21 September 2014, KENZO Parfums Showroom, Paris
Losing the sense of smell can leave people feeling emotionally blunted – so why is a new exhibition about anosmia so moving, asks Mick O'Hare
Have you ever had a fleeting moment when an aroma drifts your way and you are transported to childhood, maybe to a room or a specific place? Have you any idea why or how that happens? What if it never happened? More than 1 in 20 people have an olfactory disturbance, from anosmia (no sense of smell at all) through phantom smells to sensing aromas that are horribly distorted.
Photojournalist Eléonore de Bonneval explored the relationship between humans and their olfactory systems in a multi-sensory exhibition which concluded recently in Paris and is travelling to other venues in Europe and the US in the coming year.
There are three parts to the exhibition. For the first, de Bonneval worked with Scentys, a French company that specialises in perfuming public and commercial venues. As visitors approach a series of unlabelled cylinders, Scentys's diffusion system releases a series of aromas: these range from the odour of a public lavatory, through baby products, to cut grass and other aromas of everyday life. In the second room, visitors are invited to match what they smelled to de Bonneval's images of mundane yet visually arresting items such as a pile of pencil shavings or the Paris Metro. This is unnervingly hard to do.
"What is interesting with perfume, or any odorant, is its ability to convey emotion," says Evelyne Boulanger, a perfumer who works with de Bonneval. "People with no sense of smell are detached from this mental faculty."
This point is explored in the exhibition's third space, a large greenhouse hung with photographs of people who live without a sense of smell, or with distorted olfaction. The captions accompanying the photographs are deeply emotive: one subject is depressed that they will never smell a flower again; another is painfully aware of never experiencing the joy of the aroma of fresh bread. The greenhouse setting deliberately echoes the sentiments of a subject who lost their sense of smell following a head injury and describes life since that event as "like looking through a window".
Smell triggers
Arnaud Aubert, a neuroscientist at the University of Tours in France, says people with anosmia are prone to depression. "Smell loss deprives the limbic system of some of its sensory input," he says, "and this can lead to emotion-related disorders."
Marisa Denos, a neuropsychologist at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, has developed odour-memory workshops for people with neurological disorders. She is now collaborating with de Bonneval on interactive elements for the exhibition's forthcoming tour. Having studied the links between smell and recollection, she says that the experience of being transported to a childhood memory by an odour relies, oddly enough, on the elusiveness of that odour. A smell that is easily identified is not a powerful memory trigger.
"When we attempt to recognise an odour," she says, "our hippocampus is activated. That's the same region activated when we memorise or retrieve personal information. Data from Alzheimer's patients show loss of general memory, hippocampal dysfunction, and impaired odour memory, suggesting that this brain region is important for the memory of smells, past events and the link between them."
"I wanted to discover what life is like without smell, its link with emotions, food, social life and the world around us," says de Bonneval. Her exhibition sets up conflicts between perception, expectation and experience that distort the visitor's world in subtle ways: gallery-goers leave her rooms mildly confused, but also enlightened. Breaking the link between odour and memory can, we discover, bring people great unhappiness. De Bonneville gives us just a hint of what that shattering must be like, makes smell a little bit difficult, a little bit mysterious – and makes us aware of the tragedy of its passing.
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