Berlin with Christophe Laudamiel (3): The Honey Bearer

Sweet golden lava thrust upwards by a rushing gust of ozone. Honey unnaturally poured into rock-crystal honeycombs. To me: the smell of Berlin.

Linking a fragrance to experiences within a time-space frame (say, a trip to Berlin). A form of olfactory geomancy we unconsciously perform every time we choose a scent for a special circumstance, a specific place. Assigning a meaning to its notes not necessarily intended by its author.

What better note to wander in an unknown city on Easter weekend with a perfumer whose given name is that of the saint who bore Christ across a river – the patron saint of travelers --, and whose surname literally dips into honey – “miel”, in French? Throughout our walks, Christophe Laudamiel kept repeating how much he recognized himself in the fragrance.

When I first smelled Nouveau Né, I said it felt like honey pushed upwards by an ozonic base: like the toad-in-the-grass, the composition gave off an arrestingly spatial impression. Christophe Laudamiel then showed me the moodboard supplied by Sebastian Fischenich of Humiecki & Graef, the brand that commissioned the composition: honey on top, an obelisk-shaped shaft of rock crystal underneath it.

The idea, he explained, was to work on a contemporary, non-animalic honey, with no beeswax effects. Nouveau Né (“newborn”, but you can also hear “new nose” in French) is part of a diptych on the themes of hope and schmerz (“pain”, but it sounds much more painful in German). The latter is expressed by Abîme, authored by Laudamiel’s partner Christoph Hornetz.

Nouveau Né’s punked-out honey seeped into my Berlin wanderings, making the memories stick. Thrust itself into the very structure of Berlin – its history, a shard embedded in its walls and streets, like that crystal-ozone needle rammed into Nouveau Né’s honey.

On a Friday night at the (in)famous Kit Kat Club – if Süskind’s Perfume had been adapted into film by Tom of Finland, it might have been the setting for the final scene (though those dozens of sweat-slick bodies were astonishingly un-whiffy: the Berlin gay milieu clearly bolsters the deodorant industry).

In the grey dawn light, wandering out of the Kit Kat into a convenience store for a 6 a.m. snack and a last dance with the handsome bearded Asian cashier. Then down Heinrich-Heine Strasse with its graffiti, dumps, bullet-pocked squats and foreboding power stations: a dystopian postcard-perfect image of the former East Berlin.

In the lovely Jugendstil courtyards of Hackesche Höfe, now dotted with clubs, restaurants, theatres and quirky shops: once, a plaque reminds us, a hub for the Jewish community.

 At the foot of a gigantic 70s apartment block straight out of Andreas Gursky, satellite dishes blossoming on every balcony to catch Turkish TV, encasing the massive concrete bunker built in 1943 by Soviet forced labor. It proved too costly to demolish: the Pallasseum, aka Sozialpalast, was built around it.

But also: the deep Slavic despair of the burly handyman at the lovely Quentin Design Hotel (that’s my room on the website), when he realized he would have to break open my defective room safe to liberate my wallet. He looked as though he’d cry. I felt like hugging him.

Scenes now caught in the amber of memory. A lick of honey for the Berlin bear. 

To read part 1 and 2, click here and here.

Illustration: The Tamer, by Hannah Höch (1930).

Berlin avec Christophe Laudamiel (3): Passeur de miel

Lave sucrée soyeuse soulevée par une bouffée d’ozone. Miel versé dans des rayons de cristal. Pour moi : l’odeur de Berlin.

Chaque fois que nous choisissons un parfum pour une circonstance ou une destination (par exemple, un weekend de Pâques à Berlin), nous pratiquons une forme de géomancie olfactive. Assignons à ses notes un récit, un sens, que ne lui a pas forcément attribué son auteur.

Quelle meilleure note pour errer dans une ville inconnue un vendredi saint avec un parfumeur dont le prénom est celui d’un passeur (Saint Christophe) et dont le patronyme est littéralement plongé dans le miel ? Tout au long de cette errance, il ne cessera de me répéter qu’il se reconnaît dans ce parfum…

Lorsque j’ai senti Nouveau Né pour la première fois, j’ai parlé de miel poussé par un fond d’ozone : comme le crapaud dans l’herbe, la composition suscite un effet étonnamment spatial. Christophe Laudamiel m’a alors montré le mood board envoyé par Sebastian Fischenich de Humiecki & Graef, la marque qui lui a commandé ce parfum : le haut du collage montre en effet du miel ; le bas, un obélisque de cristal de roche.

Il souhaitait travailler sur un miel contemporain, non-animal, sans effets cire d’abeille. Nouveau Né (où il n’est pas interdit de prêter l’oreille à l’homophonie – nez) fait partie d’un diptyque consacré à l’espoir et à la douleur – Schmerz, en allemand : ça fait encore plus mal. Laudamiel a choisi le premier thème, son partenaire Christoph Hornetz le second, intitulé Abîme.

Le miel punk de Nouveau Né, en s’infiltrant dans mes errances berlinoises, m’a servi de colle à souvenirs. Ses aiguilles de cristal ozonique, fichées dans l’odeur comme des échardes d’histoire dans les murs de la ville, en ravivent la mémoire.

Un vendredi soir au Kit Kat Club – si Le Parfum de Süskind avait été adapté au cinéma par Tom of Finland, il aurait tourné ici la scène finale (curieusement, ces dizaines de danseurs luisants de sueur ne sentaient pas le fauve : la scène gay de Berlin soutient manifestement l’industrie du déo).

Dans l’aube perlée du samedi, dernière danse avec le jeune et beau caissier indien du tabac, à côté du Kit Kat, où nous nous étions arrêtés pour acheter du chocolat. Puis Heinrich-Heine Strasse avec ses graffitis, ses décharges sauvages, ses squats aux murs grêlés de trous de balle et sa centrale électrique : carte postale dystopique jusqu’au cliché de l’ex-Berlin Est (mais des oiseaux et des arbres).

Dans les ravissantes cours Jugendstil de Hackesche Höfe – restaurants, théâtres, boutiques branchées mais jadis, nous rappelle une plaque, un quartier juif.

Au pied du Pallasseum, dit Sozialpalast, HLM 70s géante sortie d’une photo d’Andreas Gursky, où des dizaines de paraboles pimpantes tournées vers la Turquie fleurissent aux balcons – un bunker massif construit en 1943 par des prisonniers soviétiques y reste encastré car il aurait été trop coûteux de le démolir.

Mais aussi : le désespoir slave de l’homme à tout faire du Quentin Design Hotel (la photo du site représente ma chambre) lorsqu’il a compris qu’il devrait percer le coffre-fort en panne qui contenait mon portefeuille… Il en était au bord des larmes.

Souvenirs figés dans l’ambre. Une lichée de miel pour l’ours de Berlin. 

Pour lire les première et deuxième parties, cliquez ici et ici.

Illustration: Rainer Werner Fassbinder et Ingrid Caven (pour moi: Berlin).

Berlin with Christophe Laudamiel (2): "Your brain is learning a new language, it will not explode"

Since the visual will always trump the less verbalized, fuzzier olfactory perceptions, exhibitions using scent often tend to turn the latter into a gadget. As for exhibitions of scent, they struggle with the way scents are shown. Perfume is an art of space: boundless and diffusive, it saturates the air and mixes with other compositions. It is also an art of time: its form develops over the hours, so that sending out a puff of Jicky will distort the form of Jicky, which is not meant to be perceived all at once but as it evaporates.

Perfume is also a type of performance art. First because, if it has been conceived as fine fragrance, the heat of its wearer’s body is needed for its form to become perceptible. Then, more importantly, because it is our “reading” of it that materializes it into words, images, stories.

Christophe Laudamiel and Jakob Kupfer’s joint exhibition at the Mianki Gallery in Berlin(from 13.03 to 19.04.2014) plays on these phenomena while subtly disrupting them.  

The exhibition displays a series of installations designed to experience/experiment on the way colors and shapes inflect olfactive perception. Jakob Kupfer is an elusive Lichtmahler (a term gallerist Andreas Herrmann translates as “photo painter”, i.e. “painter with light”) whom no one has ever met. He supplied two types of images called FADES. The first are photos of colored lights on waxed pigment prints that somehow feel like they are moving, reproducing the unfocused gaze of a newborn’s eyesight. The others are light-boxes in which many pictures are layered: a mechanism within the box creates a “motion picture”, so that the abstract colored spots are constantly morphing.

 Two square white “frames” are set in the middle of the room. You’re meant to put your head inside a frame and look at one of the pictures while pressing a button to catch a whiff of either Four Seasons Flower or Gone with the Wind. Your spontaneous perception of the scent will vary according to what you’re seeing.

Both scents are “static”: it is the movement of the images that induces a sense of time at each “scent-viewing”, as your brain is tricked by colors into perceiving the notes differently each time you see-smell. So that the classic relationship between image (static) and fragrance (evolutive) is reversed. Or rather, they contaminate each other, since the moving image sets the scent in motion, and the scent-moment freeze-frames the morphing image. The action of scent on image also induces figurative artefacts: when your brain gropes for representations (as it always does in the presence of abstract perfumes or pictures), you start see-smell-naming real things. For me: successively jelly beans, cotton balls, a splash of green sap.

The second type of installation solves the main commercial issue of scent-art: its invasive nature. Here, the scents are presented in “parabola”: concave porcelain dishes with a lid, holding impregnated pieces of ceramic. You smell the “fumes” in the lid. You put the genie back in the bottle when you set the lid back on the dish. These can be experienced with or without a visual “partner”: in the latter case, words (the titles) act as hooks for meaning, though you are encouraged to smell first, read later.  Scent art is not a Greenbergian, intransitive “nothing but the olfactory” form of expression: it always-already plays on the words that inspired it or that it inspires.

Because the idea is to experience each “sight-smell” as spontaneously as possible, these installations yield the constantly renewed pleasure of surprise. And because these successive, instantaneous bubbles of see-smell-name play on the most fleeting of perceptions, brought on by the most ungraspable, indescribable elements – scent molecules and photons --, they generate myriad immaterial, irreproducible, ephemeral, individual artworks. Tiny synesthetic seizures; stop-motion brainwaves; pop-up memories.

And the beauty of it is that anyone can get it. This novel form of show-and-smell manages to be pedagogical – the other major hurdle of scent-art is that almost no one knows about fragrance, so that you always have to go back to Scent 101 – without supplying a word of explanation, just a set of directions.

To view scent sculptures:

1. Close your eyes.

2. Breathe naturally, do not sniff or change your breathing.

3. Your nose habituates to a scent in minutes but does not get tired.

4. To refresh: breathe your own skin, no coffee beans please.

5. Your brain is learning a new language, it will not explode.

For parts 1 and 3 of this series, click here and here.