This work has been commissioned and co-produced by Mediamatic. It was presented at the Long Night of Museums (2016) in Amsterdam (NL).

Love Sweat Love is a performative olfactory dating experiment that explores physical attraction in connection to people’s body scents. Conceptually, it challenges smell’s historically pejorative relation-ship to animalism and sexuality, which fuelled the neglect and moral repression of the sense of smell in aesthetics and modern psychoanalysis.

During the experiment, performers appeared as scientists in traditional white lab coats inviting visitors to collect and donate a sample of their own underarm body scent. Each participant was assigned a number which anonymously displayed their collected sample in a glass jar. While sampling their own scent, participants could smell their way through the collection of body scent samples of the other participants. The smelling experience was guided by a short paper questionnaire which invited participants to reflect upon the associations, feelings, and odor identifications they related with the body scent samples of up to three body scent samples they felt most attracted to. The “scientists” informed participants via short message service (SMS) or email when someone liked their scent. These messages would for instance read: “Number 63 likes our scent”. With this information at hand, participants could seek out to smell the body scent samples in jars from the number(s) that liked them. When two participants both fancied each other’s smell, the “scientists” offered to connect the pair and provide them with a free drink at Mediamatic’s bar.

Mannigel produced Shaking Off Disinterested Contemplation: Toward a New Aesthetics of Smell—an essay critically exploring Love Sweat Love. It’s part of Olfactory Art and the Political in a Age of Resistance (2021), Routledge, edited by Gwenn-Aël Lynn & Debra Riley Parr.

Credits
Photo: Anisa Xhomaqi & Mediamatic
Supported by: Mediamatic