ODORAMENTO, Chantal Sanier's olfactory installation at the Hôtel de la Marine

With ODORAMENTO by Chantal Sanier, the Centre des monuments nationaux is offering a unique olfactory experience integrated into the tour of the Hôtel de la Marine, to be discovered from 19 March 2024. The artist and creator of scents is seeking to engage the memory and imagination of visitors through her original creations: scented sculptures in cold wax. Using a process developed by Chantal Sanier, the object itself becomes the fragrance. The sculptures, inspired by eighteenth-century objects from the Musée du Parfum Fragonard and displayed in six areas of the Hôtel de la Marine flats, deliver a variety of olfactory atmospheres to evoke characters from the Garde-Meuble (the intendant Marc-Antoine Thierry de Ville d'Avray, his wife, the servants), and their way of life.

In 2021, the Centre des monuments nationaux invited Chantal Sanier to design the olfactory ambiences in the bathroom of Marc-Antoine Thierry de Ville d'Avray's flat and the bedroom of Madame de Ville d'Avray as part of the public opening of the Hôtel de la Marine. The ODORAMENTO project extends the experience to other areas of the building, with a broader creative gesture, initiating a veritable olfactory journey that will introduce visitors to the olfactory culture of the 18th century. To create the scents, Chantal Sanier worked with historian Gatien Wierez, a specialist in the work of the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne at the end of the reign of Louis XVI. These six wax sculptures are truly unique artistic objects. The wax medium allows the fragrance to be diffused in a special way. Its intensity is modulated according to temperature variations and the attention paid to it by visitors. By reproducing 18th-century bottles, perfume burners and potpourris in the form of scented objects, Chantal Sanier turns the traditional contents of these decorative objects - perfume - into the very material of her sculptures. The content emerges from the container, or rather replaces it, by taking on a solid nature.

Visitors are enchanted by this new form of expression. Before laying eyes on these velvety white wax sculptures, the senses and imagination are awakened by subtle fragrances with floral, peppery, fruity, woody or musky notes. With ODORAMENTO, visitors can (re)discover the heritage areas of the Hôtel de la Marine while taking a new olfactory journey to the heart of the 18th century. At the start of the visit, a mediation document will be made available to guide visitors through this olfactory journey.

The ODORAMENTO installation is included in the "Stewards' Apartments" tour at a cost of €17.

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