We are delighted to announce the first international symposium of the ERC project OLFAC. Exploring the Intervening Performativity of Smell. 

Hosted by the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, the event brings together an international constellation of scholars and artists to explore the many ways in which smell intervenes in cultural, aesthetic, and political formations.

What does it mean to smell? What do odors enable us to sense, to know, to feel? How are perceptions, techniques, technologies, politics, and aesthetics of smell entangled with one another—and how might these relations be situated and theorized?

At the heart of the symposium lies an exploration of the epistemic, affective, and political dimensions of olfaction— it asks what it means to think through smell: to consider its interplay with other senses, its presence within political, technological, ecological, and aesthetic constellations, and its manifold cultural meanings and practices. In tracing these connections, the symposium also explores how smelling is bound up with social norms, with stigma and control, and with olfactory orders forged under colonial conditions—orders that continue to structure and signify unequal relations in the present.

While the OLFAC project investigates smell as a performative force at the intersection of sensory politics and aesthetics, the symposium opens an expanded field of inquiry: one that invites participants to critically engage with olfaction across disciplinary, methodological, and sensorial thresholds.

Gathering an international group of scholars and artists, the event assembles perspectives from cultural and media studies, art history, psychology, performance and dance studies, chemistry, and the arts.

We warmly welcome all those interested in the multisensory, critical, and imaginative dimensions of smell to join us in Vienna!