AG : You’ve talked about your work in terms of ‘Olfactive Objects’, and it seems to me that what you do is very much involved with materiality, with specific materialities (obviously coming out of your background in chemistry) – but at the same time there is this immateriality ; it’s intangible, vaporous. How do you think about objecthood and materiality in your work ?
LDG : I mean, it’s highly material, it’s about nanoscale molecules which hit receptors made of proteins inside the nose. We can say that without this materiality there’s no such thing as smell. But then we can also dream of smell. And people with anosmia [who do not perceive odor] will describe reminiscences of smell, without an external stimulus … I am also interested at the moment within physical objects, magnitude and iridescence.
AG : This question of recollection is interesting – I personally find it very difficult to remember smells. I mean, smells are completely bound up with memory – the smell of sawdust immediately takes me to a very specific time and place in my childhood, for instance, and yet when I try to recreate the smell of sawdust now, it falls short. Maybe I can remember some sensations and associations, but I can’t recreate the direct olfactive information. I think that part of what is interesting about working with smells as your material is that they don’t lend themselves to being recorded, represented or archived – at least not in the way that visual information does…
LDG : Well, when you say you’re bad at imagining a smell, it might just be because you’re very good at it. You’re not satisfied with what you are able to create in your mind, because your parameters are always changing. It’s very relative. I mean, you can describe a smell with molecules, there is a language for it, we can quantify it, but there is something else, and that something is always shifting. The fact that you’re not able to articulate it does not mean that you’re bad at remembering it.
AG : So smell is resistant to language. It doesn’t like to be described. We rely on association because in our everyday speech we don’t have much of a vocabulary for the smells themselves. I’ll say something smells “like strawberry”, because I don’t have a word for the smell itself… How do you name and categorise the smells you work with ?
LDG : This is my professional deformation in a way ; I am just using the technical language I was taught and raised in. Specific odorant materials become the common referential shared in the perfumers community Of course these categories are not sufficient – you can identify a smell as fruity or floral, you can say “strawberry” or “rose”, but how old is the strawberry, what kind of rose it is ? You have Damask rose (mainly Bulgarian, or Turkish) and Centifolia rose (Moroccan, French) to name the most common ones. Then different extraction processes lead to an essence (essential oil) and there’s rose water, or an absolute. So, ok, there are multiple references within the name “rose”. But is that enough ? Is it sufficient ?
AG : Things fall outside the standard classification system ?
LDG : Of course, everything falls outside it, in a way.
AG : I know we said we wouldn’t go too much into personal biography here but I am very curious about your transition from the perfume industry into being an artist. What happened ?
LDG : While I was a student in Science and Engineering, I did my research on the analytical and organoleptic quality of saffron from different origins. I then studied perfumery at ISIPCA, and I worked as a perfumer for the fragrance industry for several years. Eventually I realised I wanted to work in another economy. To use my brain for something more useful.
AG : It’s nice you think of it in terms of being useful.
LDG : I don’t know if now being an artist I am useful, but, at least I feel better about what I’m doing. And I was always working with artists, doing side projects. When I was a student I was also working at the Opéra National de Paris, for money, and I could attend all the productions and rehearsals. I could also spend time at the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra National de Paris, a very nice library, where I found out about the first opera in Paris that was perfumed – in 1952, it was Les Indes Galantes by [Jean-Philippe] Rameau, staged by Maurice Lehmann.
AG : So they had a script with different smell at different times ?
LDG : No, there was only one, a rose fragrance, sprayed during the 3rd act which is called “les fleurs”.So it was totally literal. I found records in the archive about the soprano complaining that the perfume was jeopardising her voice on stage.
AG : Initial attempts to introduce olfactive cues in the cinema were problematic, because it’s so difficult to synchronise. I read that with this film The Scent of Mystery in 1960 they tried to release certain smells, but when the image on screen changed but the smell from the last scene was still there. How do you get rid of it ? Scent and cinematic vision have incompatible temporalities. Smells move and spread and take time – there’s no such thing as an olfactive montage … Or is it just that our sense of smell is so feeble that we can’t handle the information ? Compared to other animals, the human olfactive system is extremely weak, right ?
LDG : Yes, I mean, there are also animals with no sense of smell, as far as we know. But dogs, for instance, have a sense of smell that is way beyond ours, and obviously their threshold of detection is much higher. You know, speaking of animals … we are so concerned with being clean – we wash away all the bacteria, the colonies who live in our sweat, feeding on our warm wet skin, creating very different odours on different bodies. We use body washes that are highly perfumed, mostly with clear, fresh, ozonic and watery olfactive notes and also containing animalic notes.T (I can not get read of this capital T) and we add perfumes with leathery, animalic notes. So after washing we want re-gain an animality, but this animality is more generalised, it’s not your bacteria colony or my bacteria colony, it’s a kind of acceptable, uniform animality. It’s an animality, but at least it’s not yours – it’s one that you bought.
AG : Ha. You know, dogs can’t recognise themselves in a mirror. They can recognise a dog, an other, but it’s not an idea of the self as a delineated image. Humans recognise themselves, but then we only pick up on a tiny fragment of the olfactive information that our canine companions deal with. So they don’t see themselves in the mirror because the mirror image doesn’t offer anything to smell, it doesn’t register for them, it doesn’t matter, because they’re perceiving the world in a different way. Do you think human animals have an over-reliance on vision ?
LDG : Yes, sure. As a species we have lost a lot of our capacity for smell in our evolution. We are still losing it, you know. With the mass production of food, the trend for ready-made dinners, everything comes already flavoured. Raw ingredients are industrially grown and transformed in such a way that they lose their subtleties of flavour. And if you don’t know it, you don’t have the feeling of missing it. For me it’s highly political. This is biopolitics.