Sensory Art

Gratitude and wonder: co-hosting the scent dinner of dreams

Culinary Art, Olfactory Experiences, Sensory Art, Storytelling and Art Making /

In this month’s longer blog, Lisa Witter and I reflect on our co-creation and co-hosting of our first bespoke scent dinner: “The Ethereal Feast”. If our offering resonates with you, please get in touch.

In a world where we spend increasing amounts of time on our computers and cell phones, we often find ourselves feeling alone together, despite being constantly connected. In an age increasingly dominated by machines and AI, we are reminded that what makes us human is our consciousness, self-awareness, creativity, empathy, and ability to experience and express emotion. A scent dinner is a sensual and communal experience that satisfies a craving many of us have but often overlook. It allows us to sit in awe of the human experience.

Our scent dinner “The Ethereal Feast” is a unique and immersive experience that offers a journey through food, conversation, and introspection. It involves a carefully curated menu that engages all the senses, including taste, smell, sight, touch, and sound. The rhythm of the courses, surprises, and conversations unfold organically throughout the scent dinner experience

Lisa writes:

Ines is a unique and valuable asset to society – an artist who intuitively captures emotions and translates them into art, enabling us to experience these feelings firsthand. Our collaboration on this scent dinner led to a successful co-creation that resonated with a diverse global community.

Participants immersed themselves and savored what mattered to them – they reflected deeply and committed to savoring more in their lives, activating gratitude from within. Gratitude, a powerful tool, helps us to focus on what we are blessed with, rather than on what we lack. Scientific evidence shows that gratitude triggers physiological changes in our bodies activating the parasympathetic nervous system, aiding rest and digestion. This bodily response means that gratitude can lower blood pressure and heart rate and promote overall relaxation. And who doesn’t need that these days?

Ines’ artistry and our collaboration have not only created a unique scent dinner experience but contributed to the well-being of every participant. Her work, and our collaboration, are a testament to the power of art and gratitude in shaping our human experience and promoting health and relaxation. Now, we aim to expand this experience around the world.

I love bringing people together, to me life is like a grand mosaic. The vibrant tiles of the small moments come together to form a bigger, more striking design. It’s all about observing the various facets of experience as they interact with each other. Our scent dinners are a culmination of flavors, wonders, laughter, curious glances, touches, and the deliberate savoring of every moment.

Lisa and Ines write:

The participants of our scent dinner were deeply moved. It opened up their senses and created new connections within themselves and with their dinner partners. Their testimonials highlight how our scent dinners offer a dining experience that transcends the ordinary, engaging people on multiple sensory levels and fostering deep connections between them.

Ramona Liberoff recalls the magic of an evening that turned strangers into lifelong friends.

Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir recounts surrendering to the sensory journey we co-curated, which created a blend of awe-inspiring tastes, sounds, and shared laughter, all suspended within a singular physical space and moment in time.

Tracy Gray, a practicing Buddhist, emphasizes the rarity of being fully present and describes our scent dinner as a unique opportunity to reach this state – in a fun way.

Cassie Robinson speaks to the heightened feelings and sensations that the dinner encourages, enjoying the mystery and connection it fosters.

Sana Kapadia reflects on the dinner as a sensual and surreal event that engages all the senses and emphasizes the art of savoring.

April Rinne sees the dinner as not just an exploration of the senses, but also a metaphorical journey that continues to inspire her through a menu-turned-artwork at home.

Geraldine Chin Moody describes the scent dinner as a unique immersion in nature and humanity that brought home the importance of self-care, community, and environmental stewardship

We love how these accounts collectively capture our intentions for the scent dinner. This immersive experience is not only about the food but is also about the deeper exploration of presence, connection, and the human experience, curated lovingly to leave a lasting impact on all of its participants.

Image credits:
B&W: Jana Pahlke
Color: Ines Lechleitner

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Listening as a practice: Asocial Telepathic Ensemble launch

Sensory Art, Storytelling and Art Making /

This week I had the pleasure of giving an artist’s talk at the The Asocial Telepathic Ensemble launch party, released by the amazing Corvo Records label at the sound art space, Errant Sound (where I was a member for many years).

black and white photography, black and white portrait, artist portrait, art photography, female photographer, music photographer, Berlin

Being part of the event gave me the opportunity to reflect back on the Asocial Telepathic recording session which took place over a year ago — when we were in the depths of another lockdown. In doing so I realised, once again, how much listening is at the core of pretty much everything I do as an artist and practitioner, no matter which medium I choose to use.

Listening with all my senses and simultaneously translating what I perceive are at the heart of my practice… be it in creating river perfumes, encountering horses, or capturing portraits of women.

For the talk, I put together a selection of images that focus on the act of listening itself: depicting visually what can only be evoked in this silent medium.

The first image is a voice portrait of Francis Bebey, a wonderful musician and musicologist, I had the honour of encountering and listening to in 1996 at the multi-disciplinary Sura Za Africa festival in Austria – my first ever photography commission! Bebey lost his voice shortly after, making this image even more precious in later years.

street photography, artist portrait, art photography, female photographer, music photographer, ParisThe second is from the 2001 Langue des Signes series, a photographic research project on the visibility of sign language in Paris’ public spaces.

The third is a portrait of a deaf girl born into a hearing family. I had the honour of following her first steps into spoken language through a technique called Codali (CODage Audition Langage Intégration). The resulting project, Franchir un Seuil (To Cross A Threshold) is part of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.

black and white photography, black and white portrait, artist portrait, art photography, female photographer, Berlin The Asocial Telepathic Ensemble was initiated and curated by Alessandra Eramo (sound artist, composer, and vocalist) and Brandon LaBelle (artist, writer, and theorist) during the Covid-19 lockdown of last Spring. It’s an international, collaborative work of sound culture that brings together 11 composers, sound artists, curators, writers, and performers (see below for full credits) who simultaneously switched on their recording devices on the 21st March 2021 for 15 minutes. The result was a globe-spanning, telepathic recording session, documenting thoughts, habits, and surroundings — an attempt to connect with each other. No editing was done.

black and white photography, black and white portrait, artist portrait, art photography, female photographer, music photographer, Berlin The recording documents a historic moment in the 21st century, a very intimate glimpse into the reality of self isolation which has been experienced globally. Each recording offers a poetic approach to daily routine and deals with relatable themes such as: communicating with artificial voices, loneliness, yearning to travel, or being bored. 

But, ultimately, these artistic statements also talk about hope, transforming tragedy into irony, and accepting bodily and mental fragility — during the pandemic and beyond.

You can order the tape or listen online.

The Asocial Telepathic Ensemble are: Alessandra Eramo (voice, electronics); Ambra Pittoni (field recordings); Brandon LaBelle (field recordings); Florence Cats (field recordings, electronics); Ines Lechleitner (field recordings); Israel Martinez (field recordings, voice); James Webb (field recordings); Korhan Erel (field recordings, melodica); Lucia Udvardyova (field recordings, electronics); Ricarda Denzer (field recordings, voice); and Thea Farhadian (field recordings, violin, electronics).

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Das Rhein Rauschen: a multi-media journey

Portraits, Sensory Art, Storytelling and Art Making /

Das Rhein Rauschen was my 2016 multi-media exhibition in Basel, Switzerland. Translated literally, this title means The Rhine Rush, speaking to the rushing sound it makes as it flows – as well as offering a little play on words around the idea of rushing into something or to do something. With the curation expertise and support of Emily Bruner throughout the whole process, the exhibition took form. 

female photographer, Basel, Switzerland, empowering photography, artistic photography, monochrome photography From an artistic perspective, I was looking to somehow create a new river perfume and my aim was to translate as many sensual encounters with this wild river as possible: sounds, sensations, colours, stories, scents. Rivers are ever-changing and ungraspable and, yet, such a fundamental, ancient, and constant feature in our collective human history: from drinking to washing to burials to songs…

But these water spaces are definitively contained, and we often perceive them only in terms of their boundaries, their banks.

female photographer, Basel, Switzerland, empowering photography, artistic photography, monochrome photography

So, it was essential that my own explorations would take the form of a multi-media project – leaving the many aspects of the river to roam freely through my work, uncurtailed by a single medium. 

To achieve this, I hired a diver who could move like a whale, allowing us to filter out the essential ingredients for the river perfume I was creating. And I cast a woman’s body and its fragments became seashell-like, papier-maché objects.

female photographer, Basel, Switzerland, empowering photography, artistic photography, monochrome photography, female singer, female artistsDuring this process, I also photographed the model with her body casts – one of the many portraits of women I have loved capturing over the years. Plus, I wrote a river soundscape which was then interpreted by the amazing vocal artist, Alessandra Eramo. Altogether, this was a truly creative flow. The different mediums – photography, sculpture, drawing, film, and sound – emerged from the multi-sensory approach that I had started with to create the scent in the first place.

This scent formed the starting point, and centre, of the whole project: especially the exhibition at Villa Renata, Basel.

I loved sharing my initial research with the great nose and perfume maker, Andreas Wilhelm.  He actually described his position within the project as that of a ‘sponge’ in our collaborative process, which I find very fitting. The direction I chose with him was very close to a natural imprint and, therefore, close to the other mediums I used, like photography and sculptural casts. 

The 50ml perfume bottle is currently sold out, but the limited edition published with backbonebooks – a beautifully boxed set containing 10ml as a river-roll-on, an original papier-mache body fragment, a mobile to make yourself, and a photographic leaflet – is still available. You can purchase on request via email to hello@ines-l.com or via the backbonebooks shop.

female photographer, Basel, Switzerland, empowering photography, artistic photography, monochrome photography, female artists

I hope you will enjoy exploring this part of my work as a space within which to perceive yourself as a river and its shore at the same time. It’s an invitation for you to connect to our environment in an empathic and multisensory way, in order to find new ways to care and to listen.

 

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Secret Colors Hidden Within

Food & conservation, Sensory Art /

Hello there,

When I first read about the practice of Lucila Kenny and her approach to natural dyes my heart skipped a beat. The way she connects the political and ethical questions with the care for the plants we find around us and the joy of creating just makes so much sense.

Yesterday I finally had the honor of participating in one of her “Making Colors with Food Waste” workshops at the amazing new project space in Neuköln WirWir run by April Gertler and Adrian Schiesser.

Here is the outcome of three recipes: red currents, yellow onion skins and red beet skins with four different fabrics:

As I work in my creativity workshops with colors, food, drawing, scent and processes of transformation, Lucila’s perspective on colors hidden within the plants in often unexpected parts is deeply moving. It shifts our perception in yet another direction and opens a new world of relations and fields of experimentation that I want to integrate more into my own workshops in the future.

For example it is the greens of the carrot that can produce a bright yellow color whereas the carrots  – staining orange on the touch while handling them – contain close to no transferable colors. A whole new field has opened and I am so looking forward to explore it with you!

I also want to share with you a related work I produced a year ago for a solo show with Hans-Jörg Mayer at after the butcher in Berlin. It was a show and a site-specific video work connecting the art works to the space and to different recipes for fermented vegetables. The plants were then fermenting in the exhibition space along side the art works and were shared with the visitors at the closing of the show.

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Scent Soup: the power of unusual connections

Sensory Art /

Spring is in full bloom! 

With the scent of lilacs, peonies and lavender in the air, I hope you’re taking some time to enjoy these warm longer days. I want this to be a space of sharing, so I thought this is the perfect time of year to celebrate how the connections between the senses became integral to my art. We’ll travel back to when I was an art student, visiting a seaside garden in France, deep in May, the plants in full blossom, the bees heavy with pollen. I wanted to photograph and film the plant’s interactions with one another. For me, connections and relationships are essential in making art and the flowers were the perfect subjects for portraiture and composition. 

Upon returning to Paris, by some strange synchronicity, I found a Vietnamese restaurant called Fleurs de mai. Reminded of the seaside garden, I walked in and was immediately immersed in this deep scent saturating the space. It took many return visits to try and identify the layers of the scent such as different algae, mushrooms and herbs. Finally, I created a recipe for a ‘scent soup’ that invoked the restaurant. I wondered what would occur through combining the flower visuals with the restaurant’s strong unrelated scent. In a room at the Art Academy, I cooked the ‘scent soup’ for hours until its vapors permeated the room. 

As people entered, I projected the images from the lush seaside garden. Sound became another layer as I stirred and moved objects around in a spontaneous performance piece. 

Later, people that had attended told me that when they saw some of the particular flowers from the film in real life, they smelled the scent of the soup! 

I realized I had created a totally new relationship that provoked images and memories.

The richer a sensory experience –  when your eyes, ears, nose and taste are all stimulated- the more the encounter inscribes itself upon you. 

I started to look at how scent relates to color. I liked the idea of using color as a common connection between people because everyone relates to color and feels safe when talking about color. As one of my art workshops at a food art week, Color Correspondence became a space to practice paying attention to what happens when we make unusual connections between the senses. What an incredible experience! Combining color with scent invoked emotions, stories, memories and images within the group. Together we discovered this creative personal space that triggered so much play and exploration. 

Usually when people think of unusual connections between the senses, the word synesthesia comes up. We think of it as a mysterious condition reserved for geniuses or famous musicians that ‘hear’ colors. We assume we don’t have access to these deeply rich and complex sensory experiences. As an artist, I was reluctant to use the word in relation to my work for its overly hyped reputation. But then I read The Superhuman Mind by Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow, a book that describes this phenomenon in scientific terms. Of course, it’s still a poetic concept but also about using the senses to stimulate the different areas of your brain in order to make lasting connections. 

Through the senses, we all have access to changing how we perceive and memorize the world. 

I had found the science behind what I’d already experienced with my art and creativity workshops. This sensory work can even be a part of memorizing techniques or learning new skills. By including as many senses as possible, memory capacity is enhanced and you can train the brain through practice and use. Your perception of the world changes. 

Each experience is its own story made up of what we see, taste, smell, hear and touch. As an interdisciplinary artist, my passion is in separating out each sensory layer and then recombining them to create new ways of experiencing ourselves and the world around us. I invite you to take some time during these sunny days as the world begins to reopen to get curious about your sensory experiences – play, connect and discover.

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