Water- Smells Of Information
Exhibitionview, Photo: Peechana Chayochaichana
Water- Flow Of Information 2025
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Water communicates with us via odours, even though it is odourless in itself. Culturally and historically, we have forgotten how to consciously use our sense of smell. We are largely insensitive to the subtle messages that we are constantly offered by biotopes and rain. The installation ‘Water Flow Of Information’ aims to raise awareness of the olfactory messages of water and their emotional component.
The sculptural scent- installation was created for the exhibition ‘Before the Flood’, in the artproject FLUTEN, which took place in Weimar in 2025. This exhibition’s topic was the relationship of modern civilised man to water.
Visitors were able to discover different water odours through openings in the sculptures. Each sculpture has its own odour, composed by the artist and preserved in the hollow space of the ceramic. These scents are inspired by precise sceneries or places where water communicates with us.
Nereide
glazed stoneware, glass, scent, 8 x 13 x 13 cm
2025
The surfaces of the painterly glazed ceramics are inspired by the respective message of their odour, creating multimodal perceptions between form, color and smell. The scent- sculptures were presented on a wall of concrete blocks, with the intention of satirising the conservative approach to flood prevention.
With her installation, Franziska Beilfuß poses the question of how sensitisation to the processes of our ecosystems can generate new ways of reacting to our changing climate. It is an ancient human instinct to intuitively perceive nature through olfactory signals. Being aware of the odours in nature and understanding them as its language, enriches our lives. Water, the biophilic element par excellence, binds, carries and amplifies these odour- messages.
Exhibitionviews, Photos: Peechana Chayochaichana
A scent- installation in former Erzgebirgs- Bad, Thalheim
The Scent Of Water (Der Duft von Wasser)
Installationsansicht, Foto: Johannes Richter
As part of the BEGEHUNGEN art festival in 2022, the artist Franziska Beilfuß has intensively explored the transformations of the encounter between humans and water and created water odours, which she presents in the lockers of the changing rooms of the former Erzgebirgsbad.
The locker- interiors become spaces of smell and color, that visitors can discover personally.
Interview with Mdr Kultur
„You shouldn't hope for water to swim, if you visit the Erzgebirgsbad in Thalheim, south of Chemnitz, in the next few days. There hasn't been any swimming here for eight years, since the adventure pool was closed for financial reasons. However, at least a whiff of the typical indoor pool odour brings back memories of it, as the artist Franziska Beilfuß has preserved and staged various scent- compositions in individual changing room lockers. Like colors on a palette, the painter mixes different scents to create stories, she calls them ‘scent scapes’, and they all tell of water (…)“
(Grit Krause- MDR Kultur, 2022)
"The wet swimming suit in your backsack, salt water on your skin or the algae-like scent of the lakes. The dirty pond, the pure source of beauty and our own sweat - it too consists of 99 per cent water. Water is synonymous with life and as such has also become a symbol of our life- threatening treatment of nature."
F.Beilfuß