Clara Ursitti. Pheromone Link TM.

A matchmaking agency without photos

Pheromone Link TM began as an idea: a dating agency where you choose a partner through your sense of smell. Clara Ursitti developed it over several years, from the late 1990s into the early 2000s.

The method was simple. Volunteers gave a T shirt they had worn. Each was stored and numbered, with no name. Together the shirts formed what she called the Scent Library.

Visitors came in, smelled the shirts one by one, and picked their favourite. They were then introduced to the shirt's owner on a date.

The work was made in several places, in different forms: Collective Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1997; the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1999; YYZ Artist's Outlet in Toronto, Canada, and Club Dynamo in Turku, Finland, in 2001.

Choosing by nose

Every matchmaking service starts from information. Photo, age, job, interests. People read a profile, look at a picture, and decide whether to meet. Eye and reason do most of the work.

Ursitti strips all of that away. The Scent Library has no pictures and no words. Only fabric and smell. The visitor does not know whether the wearer of shirt number 12 is tall or short, young or old, what they do. Only whether their smell makes you want to smell it again.

It is a very old way of choosing, older than writing. In modern life it is usually hidden under soap, deodorant, perfume. We rarely let the nose decide anything important. Pheromone Link hands that decision back to the nose, at least for an afternoon in a gallery.

The T shirt has a precedent in science. In 1995 the Swiss zoologist Claus Wedekind ran a well known experiment in which women smelled T shirts men had slept in and rated the odours. Ursitti ran no experiment. She turned the same gesture into a real meeting.

TM and the market in attraction

The title carries two small letters: TM, the trademark sign. Ursitti named the work not as an artwork but as a product, a service brand. Pheromone Link sounds like a company with an office, flyers, clients.

The commercial shell is a comment. Attraction between people has long been for sale: in perfumes that promise seduction, in advertising, in dating services. The word pheromone itself is often used to sell sprays that promise to make others fall for you.

Ursitti takes that exact language and fills it with what cannot be packaged: the real smell of a real person on a real shirt. No formula is sold. No promise is guaranteed. There is only a date, and nobody knows where it will lead.

When art leads to a meeting

What sets Pheromone Link apart from many works with smell is that it does not end in the gallery. It continues outside, into a café, an evening, a conversation between two strangers. Its most important part happens where the artist is not present.

It also depends entirely on its participants. Without volunteers giving shirts, the Scent Library is empty. Without visitors willing to choose, there are no dates. The work is a network of people willing to let a stranger smell them.

Within Ursitti's practice, Pheromone Link moves in a different direction from Eau Claire. There, one person's smell is bottled and displayed. Here, many people's smells are used to connect them. From portrait, she moves to relationship.