Confronted with the scents of our bodies: Human odors exhibited at Medical Museion

Some time ago I was standing in my yoga studio, kindly asking other yoginis to provide me with a sample of their sweat. I handed each of them a small cloth to wear under their clothes somewhere during the hot yoga class. All these samples have become part of the exhibition Metascent at the Medical Museion, which I visited some days ago.

Our sense of smell influences different important human choices. From what kinds of foods and drinks we consume, to our choice of mate or our sexuality. The special sensory cells mediating human olfaction, located in the nasal cavity, are the only nerve cells that re-generates through out the entire life. I’m a “smelling person” and often identify a perfume or shampoo worn by people I pass on the street; distinguish between the different interesting odors in the metro, or notice the increased intensity of odors after a good downpour of rain. I think it’s because this particular sense creates strong associations and is closely linked to memories. It’s like a sweet connection to forgotten times and places. The sense of smell never sleeps, but is always there triggering connections to forgotten memories, effecting our mood and behavior in the moment.

Metascent is an interactive exhibition, facilitating experiences of scents through four installations. One installation consists of around three hundred sweat samples in little jars. Each jar is tagged with a note, telling a bit about how the cloth has been worn and by whom. Putting the sweat into a sealed glass jar intensifies its odor, and as a visitor you are welcome to smell the different samples. Somehow it feels intimate to smell another person’s scent even though the action takes place in their absence and in a science museum.

This simple method for reinforcing scents was used discretely by the Stasi to track people, e.g. by placing a small cloth on the chair during interrogations.

A second installation allows the visitor to smell three synthetically made scents like sweat, bad breath and the breath from a diabetes patient, captured on mirrors with nanotechnology. These human scents, at once pleasant and repulsive, seriously activate the sense of smell and bring attention to the different layers, or notes, of the scents. A table nearby invites the visitor to share personal experiences and memories of scents, constituting a more reflecting perspective.

Four cones with substituted urine scent from patients with different metabolic disorders make up the fourth installation. The potency of these samples illustrates how our bodily scents are determined by our metabolism and how they effectively reflects our health and conditions.

Metascent is based on a PhD research fellowship by sociologist Anette Stenslund and investigates how scents can be exhibited, in particular metabolic scents.

My visit to Metascent reactivated an awareness of scents; both in a sensory and in a more cognitive manner. The metabolic scents exhibited actually shook my sensory system with their intensity, and made me think of the importance of our body’s scents. Today, our relation to scents often focus on eliminating or concealing the unpleasant smells of our bodies. By using perfumed products (or other less allergenic stuff) when cleaning our homes, our clothes, our bodies, we beautify ourselves and our surroundings. But sometimes our bodily scents contain a beauty, a value or an importance that I would like to be able to sense.

aroma • aura • bouquet • essence • flavor • fragrance • incense • odor • 
perfume • savor • scent • smell • spice • stench • stink • trace • trail • whiff

Illustration of human olfactory system by Anne Kathrine Baastrup.