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Homebe.it p u .J
The Outpost a magazine of possibilities
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WHAT'S HAPPENING
The mind 's resistance - p. 004 In exile at home At home with Alaa AI- Aswan y - p. 006 A conversation between two refugees - p.011
Where are you from? - p. 015 Beirutness: A feeling of home At home with Jade George - p. 016 Home free At home with Farid Eslam - p. 018 The sound of home - p . 023 Homebeats - p. 024 Scents of exile - p. 026 From Iraq with love - p. 029 The (Egyptian) otaku At home with Islam Richa - p. 033
THE OUTPOST
Cities are scents: Acre is the scent of marine iodine and spices; Haifa, the scent of pine and rumpled sheets; Moscow, the scent of vodka on ice; Cairo, the scent of mango and ginger; Beirut, the scent of sun, sea, smoke, and lemon; Paris. the scent of fresh bread, cheese, and the derivatives of intrigue; Damascus, the scent of jasmine and dried fruits; Tunis, the scent of night musk and salt; and Rabat is the scent of henna, incense, and honey. Every city not known for its scent is not worth mentioning. And lands of exile have a common scent, which is that of longing for elsewhere ...
SCENTS
0F EXILE
Words ASHRAF OSMAN
Like many Lebanese and Arabs, I live in self - imposed exile. For 14years I lived in the US, home eventually fading to the remnants of a Darwish Khalife song laced with the scents of maternal bread and coffee. ow I write from my current exile in Switzerland, where the sights and smells are different, but everything is just as foreign. Yet amid the shifting landscapes, back and forth across the Atlantic, moving from architecture to curation, scents have remained my constant reassurance. Smell has always been a prominent part of my identity and my sense of longing. Growing up , I spent hours in my mother's pharmacy sniffing all sorts of cosmetic products. Even as a child, I had a knack for recognizing different people's perfumes in passing. Still, I wasn't obsessive about it then - I had what could be deemed a "normal" person's collection of no more than a handful of fragrances at a time. Then in 2008 everything changed when I encountered Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, and fell-nose first down the scented rabbit hole. I discovered a whole world of "niche"
perfumery I hadn't known about. That same year, I also came across Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher's Odor Limits in Philadelphia, one of the first exhibits dedicated to olfactory art. And in ways I didn't understand at the time, it changed my life. Now, lest I leave you with the impression olfactory art is an "invention" of the 21st century, I should clarify: its origins can be traced back almost a century to when Marcel Duchamp, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, sought to break the stronghold of the "retinal" in art. It wasn't until this century, however, that the disparate instances of scent in art began to coalesce into something resembling its own genre, one that is slowly gaining recognition. There have been several exhibitions of olfactory art since, but none yet in the Middle East- and that's where Scents of Exile comes in. Who among us hasn't experienced that uncanny feeling when a certain scent takes us unawares, back into a moment from our past? We're there in that instant, in a place or with a particular person, experiencing it all so vividly. Marcel Proust was one of the first to capture this in his 1913 masterpiece In Search of Lost Time; in the years that followed, neuroscience would confirm the physiological entwinement of smell, emotion, and memory. The great Arabic poet Mahmoud Darwish extended this to our contemporary condition in his book In the Presence of Absence. In this meditation on cities and
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exile, Darwish recognizes scent as a basis for identity and longing for places out of reach. The idea for Scents of Exile started with an international competition at a major Arabic museum. I'd focused in my postgraduate curatorial studies on olfactory art and wanted to bring a piece of this exciting, emerging practice to my own part of the world. So I made a video entry based on Darwish's text, with Hong Kong filmmaker Sheila Chui-kan. The entry didn't make it in the competition; but the commiseration session that followed, with my friend Raafat Hamze, who shares my passion for fragrance, gave rise to the project. I have a photograph from childhood-on the balcony, with my father. It's my only visual evidence of the vast stretch of orange trees that extended from our building in Tripoli all the way to the sea. Visually, l'.m now detached from those trees. Their memory even provokes a kind of sadness, given that they all eventually got eaten by the city's unstoppable sprawl of concrete. Viscerally though, it's a very different story. My reaction to the slightest whiff of orange blossom is immediate, intense, yielding to an abstract and comforting authority. It's the scent of my sense of self and the umbilical cord connecting me back home. When I left the city, I carried the absence of the orange tree like an emblem, a cornerstone of my personal "foreignness" everywhere I go. Of course, I'm alien to many of the scents that characterized my own string of exiles: the sweet cinnamon, cannabis, and fried Kroketten of Amsterdam; Niigata's soy sauce; and Dubai's curry and dust ... The first time I smelled my own belonging after the absence was in the white-torso bottle of Jean Paul Gaultier's Fleur du Male, a molecular reconstitution of petitgrain and orange blossom that hit me powerfully. The encounter was also a moment of realization. I understood, instinctively, that the power of scent would resurface as a large theme in my life. Eight years later, Scents of Exile started emerging. As it happens, lemon now sits gracefully on top of furnace smoke in Beirut, one of the nine scents in the collection; the scent of my current city, and one that undeniably feels like home. Scents of Exile consists of two main parts, perfumery and olfactory art. For the perfumery section, we were lucky to get the interest of Givaudan, a world - leading perfume company. We presented the text to their perfumers, who honed in on Darwish describing the scents of nine cities in succinct evocative "formulas." Several of the perfumers then selected one or more of the descriptions to translate into scents. More recently, in a manner consistent with our globalized state of exile, we received the first batch of development scents back from Paris for feedback: Danielle, the project scent evaluator, is based in Dubai; Raafat in Beirut; and I in Zurich. Like any design process, we'll now go back and forth, only this time between words, scents, memories, and impressions until we feel we have "arrived." For the olfactory art section we focused on the second part of the text, which describes the scent of exile. For that, we chose nine artists and asked them to develop artworks involving scent, inspired by the text as well as their own personal experiences of exile. The hope is that this project will not only bring scent - awareness to the Arab art world, but also incubate it through featuring works
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by established artists from different countries of the Arab region on the united theme of Scents of Exile. This ultimately opens the project up to works in various media (graphic, audio, and video) to be "remixed" in a multisensory installation with cutting - edge scent technology. Scent has long played a prominent role in Arab culture, a likely consequence of the Islamic limitations on visual representation. In a contemporary framework, however, developing olfactory art in the Arab world could also be a valuable alternative to the hyper - visual identity that currently pervades Western cultural production. In our journeys to make home somewhere to come back to, it is crucial to build in sync with ourselves, to make it somewhere we not only yearn to be but can also survive in. Thus, as exiles living with the leitmotif of "nothing smells like home" these bottled Scents of Exile are pieces of this never - ending enigma - where we may come to realize that nothing can truly smell like home but ourselves.
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IN OUR JOURNEYSTO MAKE HOMESOMEWHERETO COME BACKTO, IT IS CRUCIALTO BUILD IN SYNCWITH OURSELVES. Some of the best things in life, like those in perfumery, happen by chance. Chanel No.5 would not be the icon it is today if it weren't for an accidental overdose of aldehydes. And so serendipity has played its part too with Shyamala Maisondieu, one of the perfumers on Scents of Exile. Today she may be a rising star at the biggest fragrance company in the world, but Maisondieu comes from a ...., background far from the opulent and traditionally closed2 ¡a:; off world of French perfumery. Growing up in the fragrant cc culture of Malaysia, she had a passion for the scents of cooking and her mother's cosmetics, but she wasn't even aware at the time that a career such as perfumery existed. She studied chemical engineering in England before
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discovering the world of perfumery in Hong Kong-by chance, through a job advert she could have easily missed. She then attended the Givaudan Perfumery School-first in Grasse and then in Argenteuil-and now has been living in France for 20 years. What makes Maisondieu most relevant to this project perhaps is her personal experience of exile, especially that she's creating the scents for Osman and Hazme'shometown of Beirut, and for what is (arguably) the hometown of perfumery, Paris. Maisondieu hasn't been to Beirut, but she somehow captures its paradoxical essence. Starting from Darwish's text - which names the sun, sea, smoke, and lemon as the notes of the Lebanese capital- Maisondieu's first sketch is an audacious smoky lemon . The smoke is sooty, more traffic pollution ( or is it cigarettes and war?) than it is the sweet tobacco of an argileh. Its charred dirtiness contrasts beautifully with the clean crisp lemon typical of the local cuisine.
it as a relentless search for something that attaches her back to home. She can't see it on the phone, but I smile. It is so reassuring and refreshing to work with someone who's not only good at what they do, but gets it, too."
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Quentin Bisch, the nose behind La Fin Du Monde-a star release from indie scent house Etat Libre D'Orange-chose to work on the scents of Cairo and Damascus, taking Darwish's text as the starting point. On both fragrances, Bisch wanted to capture the olfactory spirit of the city, not necessarily through translating the everyday scents of the streets, but through a more abstract sensorial experience . About 15 years ago, Bisch took a cruise up the Nile River with his grandfather. Later during his stay in Cairo, he was led through the labyrinthine alleyways of one of the city's old sou ks by a smoky scent coming from within . Captivated , he followed the smell all the way to its source, which turned out to be an incense burner in front of one of the shops. Stubbornly , he ended up buying it. Darwish's Cairo smelled like mango and ginger, but Bisch's interpretation smells like this moment from his personal experience, the mysterious wood-spice incense that for him abstracted the city 's immense gap between old and new. He recreated this particular contrast in the scent by juxtaposing classic frankincense with contemporary woody notes and Juniper . Unlike Cairo, Bisch had never been to Damascus, which meant that pure fantasy had a much bigger role to play in the interpretation. He wanted to express an idealized Damascus,one that lets go of its current malaise and politics . "Can we allow ourselves to escape reality, even for the transient moment of the scent's life in the air, and to create our alternate version of what could be?" he asks. Darwish's notes of jasmine and dried fruits were the start. Bisch therefore conjures a bright, majestic jasmine, one that still stands tall in a delicious marriage with plum and dates-a manifesto of hope for the city.
Paris, on the other hand, was a more personal story for Maisondieu. It is her new home; different from Malaysia, but familiar enough to be reassuring, comforting . From Darwish's description she tries to capture the smell of fresh baguette. Bread is, however, a notoriously difficult note to capture in perfumery, often coming across as more like pastries. So Maisondieu decides to lace it with coffee, unaware of its centrality to Darwish's work, if not Arab culture: the passage from Memory for Forgetfulness rhapsodizing about its aroma come to mind, or the first lines from ummi ("I long for my mother's bread, and my mother's coffee, and my mother 's touch ..."). The third scent Maisondieu is creating is that of Haifa, a city beyond reach for many, to which Darwish ascribes the scent of pine and rumpled sheets. Pine is a note that for a lot of people is probably more reminiscent of cleaning products than coniferous sap. Maisondieu's first take is a sharp astringent pine mixed with the saltiness of sweat. "At one point in our conversation," Osman says, "referring to her bodily experience of exile through smell , she describes
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