OAP is a daring collaboration that tackles an avant-garde medium in the field of art: smell.

In recent years, interest in the olfactory sense, which has long been little considered, has been growing: we can cite the creation of the multidisciplinary journal "NEZ", the transdisciplinary and transnational project "Odeuropa" (sensory mining and olfactory heritage), "Les savoir-faire liés au parfum en Pays de Grasse" (know-how related to perfume in the Grasse region), which has been declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, and the first museum dedicated to art and odour, which was opened in New York this year. Numerous initiatives are opening up the field of smell in art.

OAP brings together the multidisciplinary questions of a fundamental and multidisciplinary subject:

How does our perceptive body evolve? What are our dispositions to apprehend the new dimensions offered by contemporary creation? How can we approach the complexity of our memories - individual, collective and shared through creation? How do we remember and what do we remember? What is memory and how is it constructed? How much of it is culture, history, neurobiology or neuropsychology? Can art help us live better? What is the impact of multimodal perception on our well-being?

Research - Transdisciplinary creation

This project is the result of the group "We are all 7 million years old", which focuses on memory and mental images and draws on art, archaeology and neuroscience. It is a group of variable dimensions composed of a neuroscientist, a physicist, an anthropologist, an artist and guests. Asking the question of memory and its mechanisms opens up a vast field of research on the image, the image of the origin or the birth of images and allows us to deconstruct our relationship to them. Accompanied by the Villa Arson Art Centre, Nice, this group receives the support of several other institutions, and takes the form of Arts/Sciences collaborations and workshops in which the creation of plastic works is a motor for reflection.

L'Odeur de l'Apparition, OAP

An olfactory artistic installation based on mental images (reminiscences and emergences) combined with scientific research with a view to possible activations in the health field.
Immersion in an olfactory fresco: the visitor, immersed in a situation that encourages the emergence of mental images, gradually unveils the odorous landscape by releasing the odours from the film that covers them. He leaves the mark of the gesture of smelling on the wall.

The stakes of this project are the setting up of a real transdisciplinary exchange bringing together the development of applications in the field of health with regard to memory disorders and cognitive problems as well as the questioning of traditional aesthetic categories to leave free fields to olfactory art.

It seems to us unanimously important to refocus research and creations on the senses, generators of empathy and connection that we must discover and rediscover, especially after the pandemic, in order to develop our capacity for wonder, questioning and guaranteeing better cognitive health for a more inclusive and caring society.