Sissel Tolaas is a groundbreaking artist and smell researcher who has transformed olfaction into a vital tool for understanding culture, memory, and the environment. Since 1990, her interdisciplinary work—spanning chemistry, linguistics, and art—has developed innovative methods to capture, analyze, and preserve smells, treating them as data, language, and intelligence. She founded the SMELL RE_searchLab Berlin in 2002, creating the World Smell Archive with 20,000 molecules, and later introduced the first Smell Memory Kit. Her 55 City SmellScapes reveal how smell reflects social, ecological, and political realities. Recognized with awards like the CEW for Chemistry and Innovation and Ars Electronica, her work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Venice Biennale, and documenta 13. Collaborations include MIT, Harvard, NASA, Adidas, and Balenciaga, with projects like Resurrecting the Sublime, which recreated extinct plant smells. Currently, she focuses on smell’s role in cultural heritage and climate change, preserving olfactory history in Bahrain and Pompeii with UNESCO and studying Northern Hemisphere waterways (2026–2028). She is also establishing new labs in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and will open a permanent research LAB OF CO_LABORATION in Bolzano in 2028. Tolaas makes the invisible tangible, using smell as a lens to interpret and reimagine the world.
