exhibition design of a multi-sensory installation
"Scents, Records of a Memory" was a multi sensory installation as part of the exhibition "Making Southwark" in the beginning of March 2024. The project in collaboration with the RCA-artist Roberta De Caro and Southwark Archive is a tribute to human memory and its eagerness to record and preserve the past. The piece reflects on the gaps and limitations of recorded history, and highlights smell as its silent and invisible companion. The art piece builds on our archival research and the records documenting the industrial life of Bermondsey since the mid-19th century and especially the work of perfumer James E. Atkinson. Atkinson's factory was based in the midst of the borough's industrial hub between the manufactures and tanning factories of leather to the production of gelatine and sweets. These leading industries that characterised the smell and odour of the area. Based on this, we portray the juxtaposition between the creation of bourgeois perfumes and their ignoble production, the area’s pollution and the demotion of the working class through smell in the industrialised Bermondsey.