12th - 16th of May 2015
17th annual conference of IFFTI - International Foundation of Fashion Technology Institutes
“MOMENTING THE MEMENTO”
Polimoda, Florence 

At the end of Linda Loppa's tenure as director, Polimoda organised an international conference that, according to Linda’s vision, became a vibrant and multifaceted event: an academic conference, a set of exhibitive and performative events, a moment of collective brainstorming and generally, a statement about how fashion education can be rethought and redesigned. 

I collaborated with Linda on the talk sessions “In Conversation With” that took place in the Odeon Cinema, as well as on other curatorial aspects, which led to the realisation of the entire event. 

It all began much earlier. In 2012, there was a gathering called “SALON” organised by Linda, which I attended alongside Barbara Vinken, Filep Motwary, Stefan Siegel, Danilo Venturi, Alberto Salvadori, and several other panellists. 
Then, between 2014 and 2015, we began to meet more often with Linda, to envision how an academic conference could become a way to re-evoke the Florentine Fashion Biennial organised by Germano Celant, Ingrid Sischy, Franca Sozzani, and Luigi Settembrini in 1996/97. The twentieth anniversary of that great event, a real milestone for the history of fashion curating, would be a year later, in 2016, and we were totally aware of that. 
Danilo Venturi wrote an essay titled “Momenting the Memento”, which provided a conceptual spark and also served as the title for the entire event.
Linda formed a small group, inviting Francesca Tacconi from Pitti Immagine, Alberto Salvadori from Marino Marini Museum, myself, and a few more collaborators to serve as a jury and review the applications. We were gathering in a small room behind Linda’s office, which gradually became our “dream” place. Walls were covered with images, prints from portfolios, various visual references, and keywords BODY | SPACE | DRESS | IMAGERY | CALLIGRAPHY | CRAFT that were central to the curatorial and conceptual framework Linda envisioned.

Sissel Tolaas
Born in Norway and based in Berlin, Tolaas studied mathematics, chemical science, languages and visual art in Norway, Poland, Russia and the United Kingdom.
In 2004, with support from International Flavours & Fragrances Inc., Tolaas founded the SMELL RE_searchLab, a workspace to research, develop and execute smell-related projects for institutional, educational and individual clients.
Sissel Tolaas is a smell designer, artist, chemist, researcher and odour theorist working across research, commercial and creative innovation. While smell is Tolaas’s medium, her approach to scent is anything but conventional; for the artist, smell is information. She composes provocative smells to stimulate memory, recreate place, capture the seasons and arouse emotional and intellectual responses.

2015

SISSEL TOLAAS: TO UNDERSTAND SOMETHING EMOTIONALLY MEANS THAT YOU'LL NEVER FORGET IT 

Dobrila Denegri: Your background is in art, but since the early ’90s, when you started your smell archive project, you have often been defined as “in-betweener”. How did this shift occur, and where would you position your creative practice right now?

Sissel Tolaas: What is truly important is knowledge. When knowledge is solid and substantial, it doesn’t matter where you place yourself. Since smell is everywhere, I have to be everywhere. There is a whole universe of smells and a vast range of ways to raise awareness about the importance of smell, and this means that I can’t limit myself only to the domain of art, fashion or creativity. I have to make an invasion into the commercial world, but also reach out towards science, technological research, and every other field, which will enable my work to develop. That’s why I call myself a “professional in-betweener”. It is the only way to indicate the complexity of my activity. It's a metaphor which tells that I’m everywhere all the time. Moreover, and very important, is that I don’t work with the commercial art-world at all, nor do I work with the commercial design world: I’m not employed at any science institute full-time. I’m looking for a healthy balance between these three different domains of professional engagement. Thus, my function is to make the link between the corporate world and the creative and scientific world. I am a platform facilitated through which an entity like IFF (International Flavours & Fragrances Inc.) – a leading global creator of flavours and fragrances – can enter into dialogue with the world of scientific or artistic research. I allow myself to act, not just as a channel but also as a creative person who can pose important subjective questions. I use my creative skills to show my scientific research and place the research in different creative contexts all over the world. It took me a long time to become so solid, skilled and unique in what I do. Of course, I could engage myself more in a commercial way, and be wealthier. But richness is not my prime drive. What motivates me is the idea that I can contribute to making the world a better place and to making humanity a happier species.

DD: Print, photography, motion picture, telematics and digital transmission of visual information can all be considered as steps towards the culture in which sight, visual perception and communication gained supremacy. What is the position of olfactory perception in our society, and how can we become more aware of the importance of other senses and communicative channels, such as smell-communication, for instance?

ST: There is something that we have completely for free. I call it: the hardware and the software. Hardware is the healthy body; software is our senses. We primarily understand and perceive the world through one sense: visual. It’s our main navigational system. If, instead of eyes, we start to use the nose for the same purpose, we will understand the world in an entirely different way. We will understand it more fundamentally, deeply and also more emotionally. To understand something emotionally means that you’ll never forget it. Nose has this ability – to make us sense the world, to make sense of the world. To make this shift in knowing the world, it would be necessary to start enlarging the range of educational methods, integrating techniques which will sharpen all of our senses: smell, touch, taste, etc. If we were to start integrating workshops and lessons on the chemistry of smell from the kindergarten, up to other grades of education, we would have an entirely different perspective. There is one more thing that I want to underline in favour of the nose: it is a lot of fun. It is so fun and playful to use the nose to understand and get to know the world around you. It is so fun to overcome all our cultural and educational prejudices, to free ourselves from too rational an approach and just enjoy the richness that an intensified, more aware use of senses can give us.

DD: When I talk about fashion today, I feel that there is a lack of proper vocabulary, a lack of terms able to describe and define practices which are experimental and trans-disciplinary, and which are somewhere on the border between fashion, art and other artistic disciplines. In your work, you also faced the problem of defining and denoting the key elements of your research: smells, odours, and fragrances. How did you get around this problem?

ST: When we try to discuss the smell, we only have two codes: good or bad. If we want to go further, we use metaphors. It’s like that because awareness of smell is not integrated into our society at any level. The level is that we communicate smell through perfume adverts: marketing has taken over where science left off. This needs to change! Now, finally, a younger generation of scientists is emerging who want to prove that we, i.e., can speak about smells in the same way we talk about colours. Colours are also abstract labels. So, if there’s a will, there’s a way. If we have a learning session where a smell molecule is the starting point, we will inevitably find a way to talk about it. We don’t have a language so far; therefore, we must create it. I have a coding system I can develop for these purposes. My methodology is to focus on the smell itself, decontextualise the smell, highlight it, give it all the respect and attention it deserves, and then emphasise the language: You and the smell – alone! Please give me a word, a term, at this very moment. Not a metaphor, not a metonym, a precise, even abstract expression. A new word or term which you can invent spontaneously, creatively, and imaginatively. That’s how I proceed, then I collect and analyse the results and use them to create my own dictionary of smells.

DD: Towards what should we, as a collective, aspire to? 

ST: Activate all our senses. We have forgotten it! We have forgotten what we have something for free. We have extremely powerful natural tools which we chase to refine, train and use to their maximum potential. We have to start teaching the use of all senses, and especially the sense of smell, which is the most undervalued.

DD: Towards what should fashion creatives aspire to? 

ST: Forget that everything is about looks. Not all is in the looks. Fashion can become much more, if it stops being obsessed with producing “new looks” so many times a year, so that we all lose count of how many seasons there are and who we are!

DD: Towards what should an individual aspire to? 

ST: Start from scratch again and start to rediscover the world and people. Put aside all conventional patterns and behave as a newborn. Rely on your body and all of your senses. Find joy in discovering the world through the senses and then triggering your emotions. Gain Play back in life. The nose is the keyword here. Remember that nothing stinks; only thinking makes it so!

Published at the Polimoda website during the IFFTI Conference 

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