Photo by Sabree Hill , 2019.
Artist Manon Bellet collects water from a swamp while working on her olfactory project, “Golden Waste,” during her residency at A Studio in the Woods.
At artist Manon Bellet’s instillation last year at Yes We Cannibal in Baton Rouge, visitors found themselves immersed in the world of Delacroix, over one hundred miles away. Not in a visual sense, but instead by way of their noses. The extracted scents of Delacroix’s bayous and wetlands were suspended in a wooden box—part of Bellet’s larger research project titled Golden Waste, which explores how scent can function as an archive. These smells, Bellet posits, are a living document of a rapidly changing region.
A Swiss artist who has called New Orleans home since 2016, Bellet started thinking about scent as a medium while living in Berlin as a visual artist. She had wanted a break from working with images, and started asking questions about the nature of art itself; did the identity, or value, of the artwork lie in the creating of it, its installation, or the reaction it provoked in a viewer?
Scent, Bellet found, is a curious no-man’s-land transcending that temporal space, vividly evoking memories in the viewer (or smeller)’s mind, while simultaneously creating a singular moment of present concentration. But it wasn’t until she moved to New Orleans that the idea fully took shape. As she biked through historic neighborhoods, the scents of her new home and its persistent environmental challenges surrounded her, vividly.
Photo by Olivier Lovey, 2022
Visitors inhaling the scent, Ferme Asile, Sion, Switzerland, solo exhibition "Between us."
“I was experiencing the new territory I was living in, the new climate, the new temperature, you know, the humidity, the heat. [I thought], oh, this is a place that has something to tell me,” she said. “And so that was the first time I started to really think about space, smell, geography, orientation, territory, memory, and loss, and how we can, through scent, open a dialogue, and try to have a substance of the non-substance, in a way.”
Scent, Bellet found, is a curious no-man’s-land transcending that temporal space, vividly evoking memories in the viewer (or smeller)’s mind, while simultaneously creating a singular moment of present concentration.
With fellowships from Tulane’s ByWater Institute and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, Bellet began research for her olfactory project at A Studio in the Woods, an art center that provides residencies for artists to create work exploring our relationship to the environment. For six weeks, Bellet extracted the scents of an eroding Louisiana coastline, interviewing fishermen in Delacroix who knew the land and waters intimately. While accompanying them on their boats, she listened as they shared first-hand knowledge of the Bayous Terre-aux-Boeufs and Lerry, and how smells play key roles in our ecosystem. The fishermen pointed out to Bellet the trout whose eggs are protected from predators thanks to a sharply scented liquid layer; they showed her the scent of spilled oil and how to sniff out a change in salinity levels, which can vastly affect the species that call these waters home.
“For them, it’s super easy to say when the different waterways are changing and where they are mixed together,” Bellet said, although it’s becoming harder to distinguish the waters as they shift more rapidly.
Photo by Sabree Hill, 2019
The end product of Bellet’s work: jars holding natural extractions and scents.
On these outings, Bellet collected soil, plants, and water to later preserve as long-lasting scents. She also spent time with the fishermen’s families, capturing smells from their homes as they shared stories about their lives. She extracted scents from the ephemeral objects of their stories: the smoke of burned photo albums one family had rescued from a house fire, earthiness from a home garden.
As Bellet explained, the best way to give scents longevity (so as to display them in a gallery) is to molecularly recreate them via what she calls the “headspace method.” After she collects her organic materials, she seals them (and the air surrounding them) in a glass jar with a vacuum system that chemically captures the smell. She then sends this to Andreas Wilhelm, a perfumer in Zurich, who analyzes the scent and recreates the molecules.
“It’s like a translation,” Bellet said of the process.
Photo by Olivier Lovey, 2022.
Visitors inhaling the scent, Ferme Asile, Sion, Switzerland, solo exhibition "Between us."
While Bellet is more focused now on teaching and raising her young son, she sometimes leads olfactory workshops where participants explore a location and its smells and discuss their experience together.
“It’s a little bit like a cartography of trying to recognize the environment we are [in] at the moment,” Bellet said. Most importantly, the workshop is a way to facilitate conversation about our environment, and an opportunity to slow down and notice what we experience daily, often without even realizing it. As Bellet put it, each scent has a “testimony”—something to tell us about where it came from and where it’s going, that is only heard when somebody stops to breathe it in.
