Short description
Archive of Smells was premiered during 2025 summer, at Centre Céramique, Maastrict; the exhibition encourage visitors to explore urban space not through maps, images or sounds but through scents.
The installation guides visitors through three imagined urban districts, each defined entirely by a distinct scent. As they move through the space, participants are invited to reflect: What kind of place do you imagine? What does this smell evoke in you? Rather than orienting through logic or visual cues, the work encourages people to slow down, connect with their senses, and allow emotion, memory, and instinct to shape their perception of place.
At the center of the project is a digital game designed for all ages, where visitors are invited to create and draw their own imagined districts based on the smells they encounter. Each response becomes part of a growing communal archive - a collective record of invisible experiences and emotional landscapes.
Original text by Cemre Kara. Adaptation by Pablo San Gregorio de Lucas
The commission
Cemre contacted me asking for help with the technical and game design aspects from the installation. The installation was building on top of a previous work of her, a workshop facilited by her using a board game she developed.I visited her and after she guided me and Emile through the workshop, we talked about how this could be translated into an interactive installation.
The piece was going to be present in a public space, and should invite bystanders to interact with the piece. The idea was now to allow people to experience something similar without the need of her guidance and allow them to represent visually the district they imagined instead of describing it in words. The game should allow to create visitors their own representation of the urban landscape that the scents evoked in them. It was important to her that the contribution of every visitor was archived for others to see.
Technical implementation
I developed an app where users can both create a visual representation of an urban district and see what other people made. The editor allowed them to select terrains
The installation consist of three Raspberry Pi with Ubuntu as the operative system. Each Raspberry Pi is connected to a touch screen. On startup the application I developed in Godot is launched automatically.
