Bjørn Berge

Smell
The tale of a fading sense

This book is a tribute to the free sense of smell in all its beauty and disgust.

The sense of smell is associated with the dark, the unruly, the erotic, the antisocial, the primitive—the very opposite of modernity and progress. When the senses fall into mutual imbalance and individual senses are suppressed or overwhelmed, we risk hallucinations taking over. We begin to invent our lives. This is unsettling in a time when the value of improvisation and the revelation of false information may prove more important than ever.

The book begins with an introduction to the significance of the sense and the adventurous diversity of odors, and continues as an olfactory historical journey through the earliest urban formations of antiquity, through the medieval plague epidemics and the industrial revolution, up to the present day. Along the way, we are introduced specifically to twenty smells that still play an important role in human life, from the smell of blood to the scent of flower meadows, farts, money, and garlic.

All illustrated with monoprints by visual artist Anette Rosenberg.