AoA x IAO: I Smell LA.

Eleven workplaces

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, known as ICA LA, runs a programme for young people called Agency of Assets. Each summer its fellows take internships at cultural organisations around the city. The programme is organised by Asuka Hisa, ICA LA's director of learning and engagement, with Alberto Keossian.

In the summer of 2025, the fellows worked at eleven places. ICA LA itself. The Feminist Center for Creative Work. La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Self Help Graphics & Art, EQT, Everybody.World, The Box, dublab, Heidi Duckler Dance, Latinx with Plants, and Echo X Park Artist Studio.

The list is varied. A museum. A Latino cultural centre. A long standing print studio in East Los Angeles. An online radio station. A dance company. A clothing label. A group working with plants. Each place has its own rhythm, its own materials, its own air.

Then the fellows were given an unusual question: if you chose one aromatic note to stand for the place you worked all summer, what would it be.

Learning to smell with the IAO

To answer, you need to know how to smell and have words for smell. That was the role of the Institute for Art and Olfaction, a Los Angeles organisation devoted to bringing scent into artistic practice. Saskia Wilson-Brown, founder of the IAO, guided the group through the process of making perfume and through ways of thinking about an exhibition built on smell.

This is harder than it sounds. A workplace holds dozens of smells at once: paper, ink, coffee, dust, floorboards, sweat after rehearsal, soil in a pot. Choosing one note means leaving all the others out. It is a decision about what is essential.

The ICA LA exhibition page does not say which place chose which note. Perhaps that is deliberate. Visitors are not told in advance. They have to smell, and then guess which note belongs to the dance company and which to the print studio.

The result was shown at the ICA LA Annex from 11 October to 9 November 2025, under the title AoA x IAO: I Smell LA.

A portrait without a face

The exhibition has two parts. First, the single notes, one for each organisation. Second, a composite perfume made from all of them. ICA LA calls this composite an olfactory portrait of the Los Angeles arts and culture sector.

The word portrait is worth pausing on. A portrait usually has a face. This one does not. It does not show who works where or who matters more. It shows only an atmosphere, and that atmosphere is the sum of small choices made by the youngest people in the field.

There is something quiet in this method. Interns are usually the people least often asked for their opinion in an organisation. Here, they decide what the organisation smells like. That view from below is hard to find in an annual report, yet it shows clearly in a small vial.

In the same season, the IAO was part of another project in the city, Storycraft, where twelve perfumers told stories through scent. Side by side, the two projects show two ends of the same work. Storycraft is professionals telling a story that already exists. I Smell LA is newcomers telling their own story, about a place they have only just come to know.

Next summer there will be another group, other workplaces, other notes. The 2025 composite will not be repeated. It is a record of one season, one group of people, one city at one moment.