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.
the OLFAC Symposium “Sensing across the Humanities, Sciences and Arts”, held in December 2025, is the main topic in the ifk Podcast “Kultur denken”.
Listen to the introduction by Silke Felber, Freda Fiala and Julia Ostwald in the first episode, followed by interviews with Brandon Woolf, Hsuan L. Hsu, Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Dorothee King.