Landscape Memories,
Sarah Bouasse

What can art do in the face of rising sea levels, heatwaves and the collapse of biodiversity? So little, sadly. Yet, if it cannot alter the course of the world, it can perhaps try to change the way we, as human beings, inhabit it. This is what the installation Landscape Memories sets out to do by engaging a sensory faculty so often overlooked: our sense of smell. It catches our attention and invites us to experience it in new ways.

Still relatively uncommon in the world of contemporary art, scent is a remarkably fitting medium for representing a landscape — a notion that is, after all, profoundly visual — that inspired artist Coco Brun: the Adriatic coast of Puglia, and its particularly unstable shoreline, increasingly affected by soil erosion. In its fragility and ephemerality, this ecosystem finds an obvious resonance with scent itself — which is ultimately always a matter of volatile molecules: elusive, changing and destined to evaporate. For those who know how to perceive them in this way, scents are lessons in impermanence.

Doing justice to the extraordinary complexity of this landscape between land and sea, artist Coco Brun, together with perfumer Laurène Sourdillon, conceived not one but three compositions, each capturing a different facet of the landscape: the rising freshness of the sea, the deep scent of the earth, and the typically Mediterranean flora flourishing between the two. Seemingly exhaled by magic from the ceramic sculptures, the three scents coexist within the installation. Carried by the movement of the air, they overlap and intertwine and, like three colours mixed at random, generate an infinite range of nuances. Depending on their position in the space at any given moment, each visitor therefore encounters a singular sensory experience.

Complex, shifting — in a word, alive — scent in Landscape Memories reminds us that a landscape is not a fixed reality, but a synergy of perpetual interactions between the mineral, vegetal and animal elements that compose it.

And then, of course, there are the memories evoked by the title of the installation. The memories of the landscapes we know, which are inexorably destined to become memories themselves, whether in a century or in five years. But also the memories we already carry deep within us, which scent, through its extraordinary connection to memory, can bring back to the surface of consciousness, along with all the emotions attached to them.

This is perhaps what some visitors will experience if they are familiar with the characteristic scents of the Mediterranean: the surprise and joy of being transported, within themselves, towards beloved horizons. But Landscape Memories speaks to all of us, suggesting something more profound: to breathe deeply what still exists.