Chaveli Sifre. Sense of Scent, 2015

It was the most blooming gardening time for a scent harvesting and classification project, when Sifre invited people to find, harvest and describe a particular scent of their liking to Seppä house garden. The work was part of the exhibition by artists form Satakunta region.

Chaveli Sifre has been working with scents and text as a way to address a space or the formation of a memory while relinquishing the usually protagonist visual outlook. For Sense of Scent she invited the community of Rauma to start an olfactory archive from within the Seppä House that may eventually expand to cover other areas of the city. Each particular scent exists in dialogue with a text that describes it, thus attempting to capture the ungraspable.

Sense of Scent consisted of glass vials containing samples of olfactory specimens collected from within the Seppä House alongside their textual description. People found memories and smells like: ”This smell reminds me of summer, childhood and grandmother in general. It is the smell of something vital, fresh and comfortingly familiar at the same time. Grass. Smells like lemonade. And also salmiakki. Smells like something old.”