This talk brings together four Swiss and international artists and researchers whose practice often involves both visual and olfactive layers. The artists Silvia Bigi, Roberto Greco and Virginie Otth, and the curator and researcher Francesca Lazzarini, explore in their projects and research possible connections and interactions between the two senses. Their work relies equally on theoretical research and perspectives from several fields, and an empirical approach. They investigate the capacities of scents and photographs to stir memory, the ways in which perfume and images can jointly convey a narrative, or evoke forgotten episodes of history.

During this talk, the artists and researcher will discuss their respective individual practice, how the olfactive dimension of their work emerged, and how they navigate and reconcile two fields, photography and olfaction, involving different skill sets and codes.

On Friday 4 October at 18.00

In English

Free admission

A horticulturalist by trade, Roberto Greco went on to study visual communication and photography in Switzerland (CEPV 2007, ECAL 2010). After his first series ‘After still life’ (2011), baroque still lifes that he composed with dead animals, he realised that something was missing from the picture, and decided to add smells to his work. ‘Morbidezza’ (2014), a form of animal herbarium, was accompanied in exhibitions by smells: mixtures of perfumes, essential oils and scented candles, but also buckets of manure, to immerse the public in an experience combining sight and smell. For ‘Œillères’ (2017), he collaborated with a perfumer, Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, to translate a photographic narrative into a scent (‘Œillères - L'Objet Parfumant’). This project was followed by ‘Porter sa peau - L'Objet Parfumant’, created with perfumer Rodrigo-Flores Roux (2020), and ‘Rauque - L'Objet Parfumant’ created in close collaboration with perfumer Christopher Sheldrake (2023). Thinking up a way of involving the visitor in the discovery of the scent, but also of being its vector during the exhibition, was for him a new way of envisaging the exhibition space. He works with craftsmen to create olfactory devices such as a glass hourglass through which perfume flows, or a suspended ceramic through which perfumed oil slowly drips. These olfactory devices go hand in hand with the extra dimension of synaesthesia that he wants to create.

Virginie Otth is a lecturer, photographer and visual artist. She is a graduate of the Vevey School of Photography, a former resident at FABRICA and the Diagonales de Royaumont (Paris), and the recipient of an award-winning scholarship at the New York Film Academy. During her years in New York, she turned away from film and 16mm to work in a scientific image bank. Since then, her interest in science and her relationship with images have remained with her on a regular basis. Since 2000, she has taught photography at CEPV in Vevey, then at HEAD in Geneva. She pursues a personal approach based on questioning the gaze and the photographic medium. Her work has been shown at Musée de l'Elysée, at Pasquart Photoforum for her exhibition ‘Définitions’, then ‘Blow Flies’ and finally ‘Sillages’, at the New York Photo Festival ‘09, at Circuit (Lausanne) with her installation “...et des poussières” and at Kunsthalle Lucerne for her project “the Sabine equation”. She is a founding member of standard/deluxe since 2005, a place of experimentation and exhibition for the contemporary image in Lausanne. She obtained her Master's degree in visual arts at ECAV in 2014 with a theoretical work on visual perception and more specifically the relationship between the optical system and our brain. In 2024 she presented a solo exhibition, ‘Un lac dans l'oeil’, and curated an exhibition, ‘L'un pour l'autre’, at Photo Elysée in Lausanne.

This event is supported by The Italian Council 12th.