Urban smellscapes: Experience fall at Loyola

Inspired by what the anthropologist Anna Tsing has called ‘the arts of noticing’, this workshop engages individuals from the Concordia community to tune into their senses-- particularly the sense of smell-- and provide them with tools to begin to map the smellscapes of local greenspaces and the urban environment.

In this workshop, participants will be guided to begin to train their sense of smell as a way of embodied sensory ‘tuning’ to an urban greenspace and to create a participatory aroma wheel of the scents present in a particular place and time. It will feature a lesson on basic olfactory groups and terminology, a demonstration of different aroma wheels and how they function, a fragrant found-object sampling exercise and a participatory olfactory mapping exercise. Participants will share sensory observations to create a collaborative site- and time-specific aroma wheel of the location.

What is this useful for? Smell as a modality and method has rich yet underutilized offerings for many forms of inquiry as it brings together the material-- and with it, questions of embodiment, relations with more-than-human species, landscape and biological processes-- with the immaterial such as communications, semiotics, language and culture. 

About the workshop facilitator:

Anna Sigrithur (she/her) is a current Media Studies MA student, writer and multidisciplinary artist. Her work explores the way people make sense (scents) of their relations to one another and to other species within the context of food production, gastronomy, and food waste. Her work engages with the senses, especially taste and smell; in 2019, she studied at the Institute for Art and Olfaction and maintains an amateur perfumery practice. 

To join this workshop, please register and meet outside on the steps of the AD building.

This event is part of Campus Sustainability Month at Concordia, a month-long series of events, activities, and giveaways.