We use our eyes to navigate geographies, but it is our sense of smell that ties us most tautly to our emotional memories. Histories of New York are ripe with scents and stinks, some rousing citizen action just as the Smelling Committee of 1891 discovered oil refinery pollution along Newtown Creek. The Smelling Committee revival attempts to map a small portion of this heritage as a collective endeavor.
Because experiences of odor are intimate, highly individualized and often ephemeral, such a mapping endeavor encourages an embodied experience of space, one that defies static mapping and often the notion of repeatable encounters. Nonetheless, the embodied investigation of fleeting experiences in one's surroundings encourages an involved ecological relationship with the materiality of the lived environment. Perhaps patterns will emerge of culture, pollution, cuisine, disarray, weeds and refuse-developing a new, non-taxonomic natural history of the stench and fragrance of the 21st century.
Inspired by the olfactory bravado of the original group, the first tour was led as an historical simulacrum of the 1891 adventure in Williamsburg, NY during the
2006 Conflux Festival for psychogeography. The trek invited reflection upon the ephemeral, odiferous fabric of Brooklyn neighborhoods by actively smelling sites, discussing the neurological structure of smell, a natural history of odor, pollution and industry in Brooklyn, and personal smell stories. The second incarnation of the Smelling Committee took place in Nolita at the
Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2007, in the form of an audio tour and mapping of neighborhood smelling sites.
