About this Event
© Transsolar: Terms and Conditions. Biennale di Venezia 2025. Photo: Silke Felber.
Deutsches Haus at NYU presents "Olfactory Arts in a Warming World," a public lecture by Silke Felber, which will be followed by a conversation among Silke Felber, Zachary Samalin, and moderator Brandon Woolf.
What if we were to perceive the current constellation of planetary environmental destruction, extractive capitalism, and unevenly distributed vulnerability not primarily through vision, but through smell? What kinds of knowledge emerge when olfaction is taken seriously as a mode of world-making? Against the backdrop of a longue durée of “Western” epistemic traditions in which olfactory experience has been effective yet systematically regulated, deauthorized, translated into visual evidence, and instrumentalized for projects of stigmatization, Silke Felber explores the ambivalent force of scent and stench. Drawing on historical case studies and contemporary artworks, her talk conceptualizes smell as a form of knowledge that both stabilizes and unsettles habitual perceptual orders. Understood as an epistemic practice, smell enforces proximity, mobilizes affect, and renders atmospheric violence directly perceptible where image and sound reach their limits.
About the participants:
is Professor of the History of Knowledge at the University of Arts Linz (Austria) and Principal Investigator of the transdisciplinary research project OLFAC, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). She has published widely on aesthetics and theories of the performing arts, German literature and theater from the 19th to the 21st century, the mediatization and gendering of political stagings, as well as on the intervening performativity of smell. Her current book project, Engineering Smells: Olfactory Techno-Aesthetics Across Time, Space, and Species, traces smell as a technology, from early modern pomanders to contemporary olfactory weapons. Selected publications: Travelling Gestures – Elfriede Jelineks Theater der (Tragödien-)Durchquerung (Vienna: mdwPress, 2023); Populismus kritisieren: Kunst – Politik – Geschlecht (Vienna: mdwPress, 2024, co-edited with Evelyn Annuß et al.); Susanne Kennedy: Reanimating the Theater (Tübingen: Narr, 2023, co-edited with Inge Arteel and Kornee van der Haven). She is co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of EPHEMER: Journal for Performance and Theater Research.
s research and teaching are anchored in the literature and culture of the nineteenth-century British empire, as well as on the history of the emotions and affect theory, the history of psychoanalysis, and the history of Marxist thought. Samalin’s first book, The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust (Cornell 2021), is a historical study of the negative emotion of disgust in the nineteenth century. It narrates the unexpected centrality of the experience of collective revulsion and of unwanted feeling to various domains of social transformation and social control throughout the Victorian period, from the development of modern obscenity law and sanitary norms to the emergence of social theory and the operations of colonial bureaucracy.
is an interdisciplinary theater artist and clinical associate professor of English at New York University, where he directs the Program in Dramatic Literature. Institutional Theatrics, his book on contemporary performance and cultural policy in Berlin, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2021. Brandon also co-edited Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2019), and is currently completing a book with Stew, the Tony Award-winning author of Passing Strange, called Problem Solved! The Music and Theater of Stew and The Negro Problem (forthcoming from University of Michigan Press, 2027). Concurrent with his scholarship, Brandon’s artistic work explores theater’s capacity as a social practice — and often as both olfactory and gustatory provocation. Over the last fifteen years, he co-founded and co-directed three public performance ensembles – UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP), Shakespeare im Park Berlin, and Culinary Theater. Brandon has recently presented work at Brooklyn's Central Library, Invisible Dog Art Center, Jewish Museum of Maryland, Target Margin Theater, Brooklyn College, Prelude Festival, 14th Street Y, Fulton Center, Harvard’s Mahindra Center, ifk Vienna, Görlitzer Park in Berlin, and a USPS mailbox on Prospect Park West.
"Olfactory Arts in a Warming World" is supported by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Deutsches Haus At New York University, 42 Washington Mews, New York, United States
USD 0.00
