OLFAC joins the ASLE Biennial Conference 2025
With its focus on Collective Atmospheres: Air, Intimacy, and Inequality, the ASLE 2025 conference took place July 8–11 and engaged with topics that are likewise central to OLFAC. Bringing together scholars from sensory, breath, and smell studies, including a keynote by Hsuan Hsu, this was a great opportunity for us to meet in person with members of the project’s board. We also had the chance to connect with new colleagues and are excited about potential future collaborations.
In her paper Scenting Entwinements, Silke argued for a shift from visual, data-driven regimes toward olfaction as a mode of sensing environmental harm. Drawing on the Kosovo Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2025—where Sissel Tolaas renders disruptions of rooted ecological relationships and vernacular embodied knowledge systems perceptible through scent—she proposed the notion of olfactormativity: a more-than-visual modality that engages the body’s entanglement with atmosphere, while making sense of what Kathryn Yusoff (2013) has called “the insensible.”
Julia’s paper Staging Clouds. Scenes and Senses in Mutation explored transhistorical European cloud choreographies by Giacomo Torelli and Arkadi Zaides following the central question of how they are bound to changing epistemic and sensual regimes against the backdrop of the Anthropocene. The paper argued that the ‘mutating’ sensory perceptions in both cases reflect and shape specific imaginations of the body in the air.
Freda participated in the online-version of the conference, taking place from July 17-18. Her paper Artists As Catalysts: Taiwan’s Anti-Nuclear Protests And Environmental Activism focused on Orchid Island, Gongliao and Chang Li-Ren’s Battle City. Using the concept of ”settler atmospherics”, the paper argued that the imperceptibility of nuclear contamination through the sense of smell renders artistic retranslation essential. By mobilising olfactory and atmospheric aesthetics, these artistic practices reveal and make tangible the latent violence of nuclear contamination, thereby contributing to Taiwan’s broader struggle for ecological justice.