FLORENCE, Italy — Many of us have a signature fragrance that we spritz on daily, but few think about what goes into producing a bottle of perfume.
Five years ago, during a conference in Montreal, a group of men approached Chandler Burr, a leading fragrance expert and curator of the Department of Olfactory Art at New York's Museum of Arts and Design. The men represented the interests of Indonesian patchouli farmers and wanted to tell Burr about the lives of the of the patchouli cultivators used in perfumes. The curator had a realization — in addition to its raw ingredients, every fragrance contains human stories from around the globe. “Perfume is filled with the lives of these people, their work, and their cultures,” Burr told ARTINFO.
That moment that gave Burr the idea for “Every Bottle of Perfume Contains a World,” an installation that ran from September 14 to 16 at Pitti Fragranze, a fair dedicated to the art of scent in Florence, Italy. “There are millions of people across the planet — farmers, nomads, tribes people, who pour their lives into and earn their livelihoods, feed their children, and house their families by cultivating, harvesting, and in many cases, processing these utterly beautiful natural raw materials that comprise the palette of the olfactory artist,” Burr said at Pitti Fragranze.
The interactive exhibition allows visitors to experience leading fragrance ingredients from around the globe by smelling the actual essences made from raw materials. A journey through the olfactory map shows that masculine-scented vetiver is collected with an ox-pulled cart in Haiti; warm vanilla bean pods have to bake for three months outdoors before being extracted in Madagascar; and, that cardamom oil is produced from the seeds inside pods in Guatemala.
The installation isn’t just about the people who cultivate the ingredients used to make scents, but also how essential it is for fragrance companies to protect the environment and land needed to produce the raw materials.
“The healthier the earth, the cleaner the water and air, the more profitable and qualitative the harvests are, and the more beautiful the raw materials are, which means the more beautiful and more exciting and aesthetically interesting these olfactory artists' palettes are,” said Burr.
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