From 3–5 December 2025, we, the ERC project OLFAC, held our first international symposium at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (ifk) in Vienna.

Over three days, scholars, scientists, and artists came together to investigate how smell intervenes in cultural, aesthetic, and political formations, and how olfactory experience can open new trajectories for research across disciplines.

Invited speakers and performers:

Paola Bianchi and Stefano Murgia; Ivan Fantini; Lindsey French; Hsuan L. Hsu; Dorothée King; Helene Loos; Marco Tullio Liuzza; Alanna Lynch; Mai Ling; Clara Muller; Debra Riley Parr; Gwenn-Aël Lynn; Brandon Woolf.
Hosted by Silke Felber, Freda Fiala and Julia Ostwald.

Designed explicitly as a triangular programme connecting the humanities, the sciences, and the arts, the symposium tested a format that proved both productive and conceptually generative. Lectures, lecture-performances, edible and smellable interventions and choreographic research placed olfaction at the centre of inquiry, demonstrating how smell can function as method, as medium, and as catalyst.

Across contributions, smell emerged as a phenomenon that moves from molecules to atmospheres, from embodied encounters to geopolitical histories. Olfaction, as a research focus, invites forms of thinking across boundaries that are otherwise rare; between environmental humanities and cognitive psychology, between dance studies and chemical analysis, between artistic research and area studies.

A number of shared questions emerged: 
How do we speak about smell across disciplinary boundaries? What forms of terminology, consistency, and relational awareness are needed in a research field that is at once rigorous and sensorially attuned?

The symposium marked the beginning of a longer conversation.
you can find a detailed programme recap here: