Our Kitchen Lab project, the City Pantry: A Cabinet of Scents and Memories, is wading its way into thick description. We’re in the midst of smell. Collecting it, translating it, containing it, writing around it. In the last three days, we’ve gone to dozens of yard sales, chain supermarkets, co-ops, ethnic food markets, and hardware stores on the search for canning jars, peg board, bungee cords, scents and memories. We’ve concocted smells ranging from the backyard to the river, to the gas station. We’ve also invited friends and strangers to collaborate in the process of writing the city through its scents.
Wednesday, my collaborators Sara N. and Jimmy went to two St. Paul landmarks—Candyland and Midway Bookstore. The guy at the bookstore told them that he couldn’t smell the books. What he did smell was asphalt, the exhaust, tar, cigarettes, and the busy intersection.
Friday, Sara and I went back to St. Paul, first to Ax-Man with Jimmy, then to Grand Avenue. Stogies on Grand was to be the first of several stops, but was as far as we made it. Sara’s friend Jessica was working that day. She unscrewed almost every jar in the store in the process of walking us through tobacco and memory. Over the bridge of her glasses, Jessica schooled us: “You take a cigar like you take your coffee. If you like it black, you’ll like it more intense.” Some of the tobacco bites with fermentation. It’s peaty—a deep scotch undertone that gets to your gut.
Jessica pinched a ½ teaspoon into her left palm, rubbed it with her right palm, and bruised the tobacco as if muddling herbs. She told us the first time she smelled cherry tobacco she couldn’t stand it. Then someone bought some and took it into the smoking room. As he lit his pipe, Jessica was transported to memories of her grandfather. This was his smell.
Each story about smell calls up other smells.
Jessica’s memory called up one of my own—the first time I smelled pipe tobacco in a schoolmate’s house in the middle of Pennsylvania. The estate was filled with opulence and middle-school awkwardness. The smell was grounding—a soft, round olfactory cushion.
I find myself increasingly attuned to smell, and brainstorming the olfactory.
How do we recreate the scents of
Spring rain
Hot asphalt
Garlic when it seeps through the walls
First love
Pollen in the spring. Honeysuckle.
Grandma’s house.
Jimmy and Sara stopped at the co-op to buy spices in bulk. Among the teas were tiny dried tea roses. Saccharine, pungent and reminiscent of Victorian parlors. Upon return to the studio Jimmy paged through a musty old book, Sara unwound a rope of black licorice, and the roses seeped through the plastic bag. Out of these actions, the smells mingled to evoke a Midwestern grandma’s house. After that, for each member of the collective, they fanned the book, and held out the tea roses and licorice while participants waved their noses before the objects. For most of the collective, it was uncanny.
Yet it’s interesting that not all scents are universal; in fact, they call up uniquely personal and evocative recollections. Thinking about grandma’s house, I remember my paternal grandmother’s house in Mexico City. Abue’s house was the smell of moth balls, tomato and onion simmering on the stove, overripe fruit, and wood. Later, the tenants.
Come on down to Walker Open Field Thursday night from 6-9 pm for “Kitchen Lab: an Unveiling” and play with the City Pantry as well as all of the other Kitchen Lab projects that explore ideas such as heat, water, and curiosity. Hang around for an Acoustic Campfire performance by Mixed Precipitation’s cast of Picnic Operetta! As a collective the Walker Kitchen Lab has been researching, developing, prototyping, discovering, exploring, questioning and philosophizing what a kitchen is and what it can be. What would you put in your Kitchen Lab?
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.