Sylvie Fleury's painted walls inspire a perfume workshop

The MRAC, the Regional Museum of Contemporary Art, located in Sérignan (France), inaugurated a new exhibition by the Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury last October, entitled Thunderb. I was invited, as part of this new exhibition, to conduct a perfume creation workshop for teenagers and adults.

Along the museum route, we discover luxury brands transformed into works of art.

The oversized marketing icons on the museum walls seems to highlight the exaggeration of discourses that stereotype and push for uniformity according to an imaginary model of "cool".

As vectors of "gender," the marketing teams of these beauty brands work tirelessly to sell us the idea of a better version of ourselves that is unattainable without their products...

During my preliminary visit to the exhibition, I chose Sylvie Fleury's painted walls as inspiration for the perfume workshop I was going to conduct at the museum. They are composed of the iconography of perfumes from the 1990s in XXL format such as ANGEL - ETERNITY - C'EST LA VIE - OBSESSION - ENVY - JOY.

Beyond the images and the intended impact of these words on our imagination, I set about choosing the olfactory ingredients that would be made available to the participants of the practical workshop. I researched the ingredients of the perfumes provided by these brands, which turned out to be mostly the same: fruit, flowers, sugar, gourmand, addictive, regressive...

The day of the workshop arrived. I prepared the workshop room before the arrival of participants.

Our first stop was to the exhibition space with the museum mediator to discover the painted walls, the inspiration for the workshop.

Back in the workshop, I detailed the sequence of events of this intervention.

I first distributed smelling strips to the participants of each of the ingredients available to them for this workshop, recommending that they note their feelings on their formulation sheet.

Once all the ingredients had been smelled, the composition phase began. Divided into five groups, they agreed on which ingredients they wanted to use. I went around to each group to check their formula, recommending increasing or decreasing certain ingredients so that the formula matched their idea.

Then came the "weighing" of the ingredients of the first trial in a mini spray bottle using dropper bottles.

I smelt the first trial of each group, then I guided them on a possible modification of their formula, or recommended that they start with a completely different formula if they were satisfied with their creation.

Then it was the turn of the second and third trials, which I also smelt with each of them.

At the end of the composition phase, each participant chose their favorite trial, which I weighed with my precision scale in a spray bottle that they would take with them as a souvenir of the workshop.

It was a pleasant moment of sharing and transmitting my creative practice.