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City Sniffers: visitors discover the history of Amsterdam in a new smell tour
A
new, multisensory tour enables visitors to explore the urban space of Amsterdam using their noses. This is a collaboration by the Odeuropa research project and the Amsterdam Museum, looking to
use smell as a narrative tool to connect with the city’s hidden heritage and raise environmental awareness.
City Sniffers: A smell tour of Amsterdam’s ecohistory follows one path of six stops with scents and stories within the city. Using a free phone application to navigate, developed by Odeuropa researchers, participants walk around smelling and exploring stories connected to the present history of Amsterdam. The tour also includes the smells of the city’s history, via a Rub’n’Sniff map containing five emblematic aromas. These include the stench of the canals, rosemary, the scent of the civet cat in connection to historic perfumes, the fragrance of linden trees and a reconstruction of the smell of a pomander, a perfumed jewel used to protect from disease during the plague. Overall, the tour will explore narratives around colonial histories, transportation, and industry within Amsterdam. “In addition to the beautiful portraits and objects in the collection that tell the story of the rich and famous, the Amsterdam Museum focuses on sharing stories from other perspectives,”said Margriet Schavemaker, artistic director of Amsterdam Museum. “Stories about class and gender differences and the city's colonial past. Those stories are less well represented in the collection and scent is ideally suited to tell those stories in a very direct way. That is why the Amsterdam Museum is collaborating in this project." The tours are open to all and are self-guided - participants can pick up a free Rub’n’Sniff map from the information desk of the Amsterdam Museum (their temporary location at Amstel 51) during September. “Although we are constantly smelling, many are not actively
aware of what they are inhaling and how this relates to history, health, and the environment. These walking tours bring forward the importance of our sense of smell and the knowledge which can be raised through it. This tour encourages participants to actively smell using the ‘Rub and Sniff’ map, and we hope they also open their noses to other smells in the city,”said Sofia Collette Ehrich, researcher and Event Coordinator of Odeuropa.
Odeuropa is a research project funded by the EU Horizon 2020 programme, capturing the smells of Europe as part of cultural heritage. Odeuropa. Negotiating Olfactory and Sensory Experiences in Cultural Heritage Practice and Research is the first European initiative to use artificial intelligence (AI) to investigate the importance of scents and smelling, and to discover how scents have moulded our communities and traditions.
For these tours, scents were developed in collaboration with IFF; the map was designed by Liam R. Findlay and printed by Scent the Brand. To emphasise the impact of humans on the environment, the chosen locations and smells will bring forward stories related to environmental awareness and how the present day is an accumulation of our past actions.
The Amsterdam Museum, where people
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SEPTEMBER 2022
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