Bertrand Duchaufour. The smell of places.

Avignon, 2002: a city made of smoke

In 2002 Comme des Garçons devoted an entire collection to incense. The Incense series held five scents, each named for a place: Avignon, Jaisalmer, Kyoto, Ouarzazate, Zagorsk. The house describes the series as a spiritual journey through historical centres of the world.

Avignon was made by Bertrand Duchaufour. The list of materials the house publishes is short and concrete: Roman chamomile, cistus oil, elemi, incense, vanilla, patchouli, rosewood. Not one word about stone, cloister or time. The name of the city does that work.

Avignon is an old city on the Rhône. Putting that name on a smell of burning resin invites the person smelling it to imagine a space: cool, high, thick walled, smoke hanging because there is no wind. The smell does not describe the place. It lets the person stand inside it.

Writing on the history of incense in perfume, Nez magazine calls Avignon one of the most admired scents of the series. In 2017 it was shown in the exhibition on contemporary perfume at Somerset House in London, beside scents of its generation.

A night in Seville

Another story is told in a book. Denyse Beaulieu, a writer on perfume, told Duchaufour about a night during Holy Week in Seville, under an orange tree in flower. From that night he made a perfume. Her book, published in French as Parfums. Une histoire intime, records the process.

The striking detail is the starting point. The perfume did not begin with the perfumer's own journey but with someone else's telling. The place reached him through another person's memory: orange blossom, a festival night, the warmth of a private moment.

So the smell of a place need not be recorded on the spot. It can be the smell of a memory of that place. The perfumer becomes a copyist of someone else's recollection, in a language without words.

Kitchens, paintings, and other places

The place in Duchaufour's scents is not always a city. In the early 2000s he made Harissa for Comme des Garçons and Piment brûlant for L'Artisan Parfumeur, two scents built around chilli. The place here is a kitchen, a pot of sauce, heat on the tongue. Both have since been discontinued.

Sometimes the place is a painting. Nez notes that Pierre Soulages's black outrenoir paintings inspired several perfumers, among them Duchaufour with Corpus Equus for Naomi Goodsir. A painting is also somewhere to stand before.

Taken together, these scents suggest a way of working closer to fieldwork than to decoration. Each begins from a specific place, with a name, a temperature, objects. The smell is not an ornament added to a person. It is a record.

A place kept in a bottle

A photograph of a city keeps its image. A map keeps its routes. A smell keeps what both leave out: the air.

That is the hardest part of a place to keep, because it shifts with the hour, the season, the person standing there. Smoke in a stone space in the morning is not smoke in the afternoon. A smell fixes one moment of that flux and carries it far away.

Someone smelling Avignon in Tokyo or in Saigon is not standing in Avignon. But they are standing in a place someone imagined from Avignon. Between the two is a distance, and the smell is the only bridge.

The exhibition Perfume: A Sensory Journey through Contemporary Scent showed Avignon among other scents without telling visitors in advance which was which. Visitors had only the smell, and had to find its place themselves.