One year ago (June 2023), the journal that I co-edited together with Amarens Eggeraat for the Kunstlicht Journal was released. We wanted to dedicate an entire journal to the sense of smell which resulted in such a rewarding outcome: Nosetalgia! If you like the content of this post, you can still purchase your own issue of Nosetalgia and the accompanying exclusive smell card here (select the dropdown menu for “Losse Nummers Kunstlicht 2023”)!
In honor of last year’s World Taste and Smell Day on September 14th, Kunstlicht, Amarens and myself invited a few of the writers to share their contributions and participate in an audience Q&A (you can watch the full recording of the event which is linked at the end of this post).
For this event, I wrote a reflection on what the term Nosetalgia means to me and how the term came to be. I have compiled that introduction with photos for you to read below:
Throughout time, smells and the act of smelling (also known as olfaction) have been overlooked in Western arts, culture, and media. However, our sense of smell’s direct link with our brain’s limbic system means that when we smell, it activates our memory and emotions in impactful ways. This makes olfaction a powerful pathway and tool to connect with our own past and that of other people and places. As well as an interesting precursor to nostalgic perception.
Nostalgia - not “nosetalgia” - is defined as a wistful desire to return to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends. Commonly thought of as the emulation of an aesthetic, we wondered if you could take a more sensory approach to nostalgic perception. How does the feeling of nostalgia go beyond a visual phenomenon and become multisensory?
For example, I experience sensory nostalgia and extreme joy from pressing these little buttons at crosswalks as they have not existed in most of Los Angeles since the early 2000’s. I listen to Jackson Browne’s, I’m Alive album from 1989 when I want to remember childhood road trips through the California desert with my mother.
But we’ve all experienced it. The whiff of something that instantly immerses us in a personal memory but also comes with a melancholy feeling – do we wish we were back there? In that time and place? This whiff really brings us close to that original “in real life” memory, something pretty unique to the abilities of olfaction. This is what we mean with the term Nosetalgia.
We can break the concept of Nosetalgia into three ideas: collecting, sharing, and connecting. And these concepts greatly shape our identity and our everyday experiences.
Firstly, collect: What does it mean to collect nosetalgia? And why should we do so? Is this collection intentional or unintentional? How can we document and revisit these memories? We all know that scents are fleeting and arguably so are memories. What about scents or scented practices which represent something we don’t want to lose or that we want to safeguard for future generations? Or endangered scents at risk of disappearing and some we have personally lost throughout our lifetime?
My personal nosetalgia collection features the fresh and crisp scent of a magazine stand. The surprisingly sweet yet musty odor of the Berlin U-Bahn. The very particular composition of smells that fill every American shopping mall, particularly that of the one in Santa Monica where I shopped as a kid. I think it was something about the fragrant food court mixed with the somewhat unpleasant, faint sewer smell coming from the recycled water fountain that streamed throughout the entire building. It is important to notice that our experience of smells is subjective – whether a scent is good or bad does not make it any less important to collect.
Secondly, share: we can collect to share – with our families and friends, past and future generations. Sharing our personal nosetalgia can help us reinforce our own identity and relate to that of others. Or perhaps even learn more about history or the histories of others. And upon sharing personal accounts of nosetalgia, we can make connections. Whether that is between unlikely concepts, unlikely souls or the creation of a community, nosetalgia can be collective, establish compassion and build new bridges between similar or different cultures. Nosetalgic connections can make us feel warm and fuzzy and perhaps even sentimental.
And what are some examples where nosetalgia has been collected, shared, and has in turn, built connections? These examples are ones which inspired the creation of Kunstlicht’s Nosetalgia issue.
Art historian Caro Verbeek coined the term nosetalgia through the curation of the pop-up exhibition, Nosetalgia: The Temporary Museum of Smelly Toys, in which she presented a collection of smelly toys owned by various individuals. Past owners of the objects shared memories with Verbeek which she presented with the object. One owner of Hasbro’s Play-doh shared: “It smelled so nice, I wanted to eat it.” I think we can all connect with that statement.
In 2020, artists Regina Mamou and Lara Salmon of Research for the Bermuda Triangle ventured to Berlin, Germany with a mission to collect objects from the former German Democratic Republic. Playing on the term Ostalgie (a combination of the German “Ost” (East) and “nostalgia”), their goal to was to take common objects from former East Germany and make them into a tinctured smell. From KARO cigarettes to Hansa cookies, the project which could be visited by the public at The Wende Museum in Los Angeles, California, successfully connected not only those who remembered these items from their past but also offered those scents to new generations.
At the outreach lab of the Museum of Everyday Life in Gent, Belgium, visitors- especially the elderly - are invited to intimately interact and handle the collection items to assist wellbeing and care. Offering all sorts of items, including scented objects, the museum said that they have built a community and intimate groups that continuously come back to talk to each other about the past memories related to their multisensory engagement with the items.
For the Nosetalgia issue of Kunstlicht, we wished to uncover how smell, art, and nostalgia have and continue to interact and overlap. We started with some of our own questions surrounding this topic, for example, is olfaction a form of nostalgia? How are smells important to artistic practice and can these smells be presented as art in themselves? Does this fulfil a special longing for the past? Should we preserve or recreate past scents? But the contributors to this journal brought new topics and questions to the journal’s pages which were beyond what we could have imagined. We are still blown away by the personal anecdotes shared in Nosetalgia - we encourage you to join the conversation!
How do you document your multisensory experiences of nostalgia? Do you have your own collection of “nosetalgic” memories? Go out and start collecting, sharing and connecting with all of life’s nosetalgic moments - it is never too late!
Nosetalgia would not have been possible without the incredible work of Kuntlicht’s editor and chief Lisa Marie Sneijder and Nosetalgia’s co-editor Amarens Eggeraat as well as Kunstlicht’s editorial staff. A special thanks to all the contributors to the issue: Lucille Lefrang, Lara Lindsay-Parker, Lo Yuen Ming, Dimitra Trigka, Florence Marceau-Lafleur, Pitchaya Ngamcharoen and Dagmar Büchert.