The Garden of Wonders, A Journey Through Scents

by: Elena Vosnaki

Curating a perfume exhibition had only been a dream at the back of my mind, until I was actually asked to do one in Milan, Italy. The invitation seemed like the perfect chance to distill what years of occupying myself with the history and artistry of perfumery taught me to the visitor. Would I succumb to the standard run-of-the-mill stories or would I offer exciting anecdotes to provoke visitors to smell with their minds? Obviously I chose the latter course, especially since there was in place the perfect foil of smelling the recreation of historical scents and fragrance families paradigms made in collaboration with acclaimed niche perfumer Gerald Ghislain; yes, he was an absolute sweetheart. 

The end result? A feast for the eyes and nose!

It wasn't easy deciding on what to focus personally, I can tell you that. The stories, the historical presentation, the breaking down of key elements in the olfactory families, the raw materials charting, the concern of context with the resurrected brands ... fragrance reissued from a past that is forgotten yet ripe for the eager entrepreneur who can regain rights to the names and the brands ...

But the completed project seems useful to the novice and enriching to the aficionado, so I'm quite pleased and honored to be part of this huge perfume and design project. In fact you can get a glimpse of some of my work on this link by John Engele. 

The Garden of Wonders, A Journey Through Scents is a project by the Be Open Foundation, a creative think tank organized in the historical Orto Botanico di Brera in Milan, within Energy for Creativity, this spring at the context of Expo 2015 in Milan, Italy. The announcement was posted on this link.

The exhibition set up is designed by famous Italian architect Ferrucio Laviani who has created a "diffused museum" where all parts communicate with each other and with the beautiful Garden area.

The setup includes three major installations: 

• The Houses of Wonders, resurrecting eight historical perfume houses with an emphasis on the design and context of their course presented through the sensitivity of eight art directors;
• A Journey Through Scents, an interactive promenade along the historical milestones of perfumery with olfactory fountains that pour replications of these "wonders" and of the main olfactory "styles", as well as a concise map of the provenance of raw materials and evolution of extraction techniques; and
• A Vision in a Box, which focuses on the design and packaging elements in perfumery and the various twists it can communicate in the contemporary art world as presented by cutting edge designer teams.

"Piero Lissoni's idea is developed around the title Lundborg and the laboratory of a 'nose:' the center of the setup is a perfume lab sculpture made of stills, ampoules, vases with black orchids and hanging plants, chemical glasses in huge proportions so to evoke the story of the brand and the working place where John Marlie Lundborg created his famous Violette Flor in 1860. The room is then covered with two big and light bookshelves with backlight panels to enhance the shapes of the bottles.

"Lissoni explains: 'The room is filled with  700 bottles in four different vesrions; these have all been made specifically for the exhibition taking the inspiration from the brands's most famous ones and produced just like in the old days.'

"The two installations above mentioned, together with the ones by Fernando and Humberto Campana, Dimore Studio, Front, Jaime Hayon, Jean-Marie Massaud and Nendo will be within a diffused museum created by Ferruccio Laviani.

"The Garden of Wonders is inspired by the history of perfume and the history of raw materials from all over the world; each perfume represented a real and imaginary journey of goods and cultures making it an ante litteram global product. In more recent years the relationship between fragrances and the look of the packages has become more and more intense, to such an extent that it has created well-defined brand identities, some of which are still used today."

A special preview was shown during the Milan Design Week (April 13-19, 2015), but the exhibition is now open to the public through the end of May. The show was such a success that it has been picked in the "Eight Jaw Dropping Design Events to See" by Milan Design Agenda. Photographs and reportage have also appeared on Wallpaper.

The foundation has invited eight designers to reinterpret the history and features of eight defunct perfume brands according to their sensitivity. They will act as Art Directors in order to show that design can become a strong point for small entities requiring a new commercial life to meet the challenges of the contemporary global market.

Among them Front and Nendo have respectively worked on French brand Guyla and Russian perfume house Koehler & Co.

Nendo faced the challenge of reinterpreting Russian brand Koehler & Co., about which not much information was available. The Japanese design practice took its inspiration from one of the company's most famous fragrances called Fandango.

“We decided to determine the outline of the perfume bottle and express its silhouette with the tube inside.The tubes come in two types, one is a gradation of cold colours and the other is a gradation of warm colors,” says Oki Sato.

“The perfume bottles are respectively named Fandango -12.3 ºCand Fandango +23.1 ºC, to suggest the average temperatures of the winters and summers in Moscow where Koehler used to be. These two colors of the temperatures also represent the cool, fresh scent of the winters and the warm, passionate scent of the summers.”

Swedish design trio Front got the inspiration from Guyla´s beautiful bottle from the 1920s. The bottle was shaped like a champagne glass, with double glass walls, the fragrance was contained between the two. Its surface was decorated with hand painted floral Art Nouveau designs by Paul Poiret’s company Atelier Martine.

“We liked the idea with the connection between Art Nouveau´s reference to nature, plants and flowers and the botanical garden. This inspired us to make an object decorated by nature. We designed a cupboard with tracery that plants and flowers can climb on, referring to Poiret´s patterns and his distinctive draped dress designs. The flowers that grow will be the same ones the perfume was made from, so the cupboard will smell like the perfume once did,” Front explains.

The mysteriously double-walled bottle inspired them to create a bottle with an unexpected inside:  it will be lit up from within. The room is also a  light installation made from hundreds of tiny light dots like fireflies that will visualise the ephemerality of scent. The two installations above mentioned, together with the ones by Tord Boontje, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Dimore Studio, Jaime Hayon, Lissoni Associati and Jean-Marie Massaud will be within a diffused museum created by Ferruccio Laviani.

Fernando and Humberto Campana worked on French brand Biette. "We’re very happy to be part of the exhibition as we share BE OPEN's goal of rescuing traditions that are disappearing. We  tried to give Biette a new life and a fresh look through our design universe," says Fernando Campana. "We were inspired by sea creatures so we designed a porcelain bottle of perfume in the shape of a marine animal. Then, for the conceptual installation our influence was a cave named ‘Gruta do Veredas’ located in the state of Bahia in Brazil. The shape of the wicker installation we created to host the bottle of perfume reminds us of the paths of this cave. For the packaging we created a black box in cardboard covered in synthetic fur," adds Humberto Campana.

Biette was established by four brothers, Georges, Michel, Lionel and Maxime at rue Beausejour, Nantes, France in 1882.  They had branches in major cites in Europe, Africa and the USA and produced spectacular soap and toiletry sets; in the 1920s they started introducing superb perfume presentations. Biette ceased trading and production in the 1950s.

Dimore Studio worked on the Italian brand Bertelli. Founded in Milan in 1888 by pharmacist Achille Bertelli, the brand survived until the 1960s. Over the years they collaborated with celebrated designers Renée Lalique and Julien Viard who created bottles and packaging for some of its products, besides having Greta Garbo endorsing their fragrance As You Desire Me.

Emiliano Salci and Britt Moran explain: "The inspiration comes from the idea of taking elements able to evoke olfactory sensations. It is a spell braking itself into nature and, by doing so, it emanates refractions, mirrorings, cross-references and quotes of reminiscences. It is a past which is born again to a new life in a re-invented fragrance. Rain washes, distill and collects in a block of onyx the essences expanded by nature."

The entire score of contributors for The Garden of Wonders, A Journey of Scents2015 exhibition are: Tord Boontje, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Dimorestudio, Front, Jaime Hayon, Lissoni Associati, Jean Marie Massaud, Nendo, Gerald Ghislain, Elena Vosnaki, Werner Aisslinger, Analogia Project, Philippe Bestenheider, GamFratesi, Lucidi Pevere, Karim Mekhtigian, Mist-o, Ludovica + Roberto palomba, Victor Vasilev, and Thukral & Tagra.

The Garden of Wonders, A Journey Through Scents
April 20-May 24, 2015, 10 am -10 pm daily 
Milan, Italy

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Source: Be Open, Elena Vosnaki