Exhibition at the Osaka Kansai International Art Festival



Exhibition at the Mikke Gallery, Tokyo


Activation at Bridge Studio, Kyoto

December 23, 2023 – January 28, 2024
🏡 Osaka Kansai International Art Festival

March 11, 2024 – ?
🏡 Museum of Contemporary Art Fukushima

January 10 – February 7, 2025
🏡 Mikke Gallery, Tokyo

May 11–12, 2025
🏡 Bridge Studio, Kyoto

Scents of community 

Born in 2023 within Living Yokocho, Scents of Community explores the idea of an olfactory community. The protocol was simple yet radical: each participant was invited to bring their personal perfume—the scent accompanying their everyday intimacy. Gathered into a single bottle, these fragments of individual identities gave rise to a collective fragrance, a sensory metaphor for a community in the making.

This mixture of scents—sometimes fortuitous, sometimes harmonious—questions the boundary between the individual and the collective. Perfume, usually bearing a profoundly intimate dimension, here becomes a medium of mutualization. With each spray, it is the essence of a “we” that diffuses: a symbiosis of olfactory diversities where the fragile but essential bonds of communal life are replayed at the scale of molecules.

In this sense, Scents of Community can be read as a form of olfactory anthropology: each bottle preserves the memory of an encounter, the imprint of an ephemeral community encapsulated in its fragrance. The project thus raises the possibility of an olfactory documentary, capable of capturing not an image or a sound, but the invisible, fleeting trace of living together.

Critical text by curator Midorikawa Yutaro: [link]

Project initiated and directed by Thomas Vauthier, joined by Fanny Terno within the duo Disconoma.