Sensorisches Kunstlabor Wien

Engaging with the olfactory aspects of urban spaces, the Sensorisches Kunstlabor Wien is a five-part workshop series along with two events at KunstHaus Wien.
The formats form a sensory line extending from KunstHaus Wien via Sandleiten to Indigenous regions of the Amazon. This double coordinate — spatial and temporal — creates experiential spaces in which visitors can sense the fragility of ecological systems, their need for care, their transience, and the feminist dimensions of care and resistance.
We understand smells as invisible, ephemeral traces that carry memories, atmospheres, and ecological transformations. They tell stories of places, plants, people, industrial processes — or of their disappearance. In times of climate change, smellscapes are changing as well.
In the artist-led workshops in and around KunstHaus Wien, (organic) materials are collected in order to ultimately produce a scented water through a distillation process, which becomes a distillate of what has been learned and experienced. The distillation process is accompanied by a conversation reflecting on the entire workshop series in relation to the olfactory aspects of urban spaces, bringing the project to a close.
The collaborative project “Otros futuros – Other Futures” extends this axis spatially into the Global South. Through encounters, Otros Futuros seeks to open a South–North dialogue on the climate crisis.