Kultur denken

What does it mean to smell? What do odors enable us to sense, to know, to feel? How are perceptions, techniques, technologies, politics, and aesthetics of smell entangled with one another—and how might these relations be situated and theorized? At the heart of the symposium lies an exploration of the epistemic, affective, and political dimensions of olfaction— it asks what it means to think through smell.

The OLFAC Symposium, held in December 2025 at the ifk in Vienna, was organized by Silke Felber, Freda Fiala, and Julia Ostwald as part of the ERC Consolidator Project OLFAC. More information is available...

Garlic’s notorious smell—lingering on our breath and at our tables—has historically been weaponized by colonial and hegemonic powers as a means of othering and oppression. What might olfaction, and odor more broadly, offer as a lens ( a nostril?) through which to interrogate socio-political relations? How and when do we abandon our fellow citizens and living things because of their odor? What do we risk by actually smelling each other? What stinks about our civic lives, and how could they smell more like Bärlauchsuppe?

The OLFAC Symposium, held in December 2025 at the ifk in Vienna, was organized by Silke...

Sensory historians raise difficult questions about the viability of recovering or even reconstructing past scents and smellscapes. How might we understand odorous substances as a kind of material archive bearing traces of historical patterns of extraction, sensory labor, circulation, consumption, and interpretation while also intimating other possibilities: ecologies that exceed the world-making logics of racial and colonial capitalism?

The OLFAC Symposium, held in December 2025 at the ifk in Vienna, was organized by Silke Felber, Freda Fiala, and Julia Ostwald as part of the ERC Consolidator Project OLFAC. More information is available at olfac.kunstuni-linz.at.

Interviews/ Redaktion/ Moderation: Katharina Rahn
Sound...

Gwenn-Aël Lynn is approaching a threshold at which it may enable the very wealthy to mine and settle beyond Earth. Yet in the absence of a breathable medium, olfactory molecules cannot reach the olfactory mucosa, and sound waves cannot travel. If Earth is exhausted, the life awaiting the few humans who remain on such inhospitable worlds would be marked by sensory deprivation—and, with it, the loss of many forms of pleasure.

In her talk, Dorothee King seeks to identify contemporary Swiss smell-based signifiers of othering and inclusion in social relations, political structures, and identity politics, situating them within a complex...