Smellmap: Pamplona

Smells are invisible, ephemeral and volatile. Smells of a city often remain hidden and undiscovered. Smells are hidden away in our memories, fragments of time stored in private places. This smell map installation invited a local population to share unique smells found in the city of Pamplona during a month-long public mapping event with the goal of covering as much of the city space as possible. A series of smellwalks with different interest groups mapped the treasured smells of the city, enabling a public voice to be heard revealing and sharing its smellscape. The resulting animated map was designed to be as ephemeral as the data; a series of volatile components, representing a series of human moments in time, a contested smellscape of an autumnal city in the foothills of the Spanish Pyrenees. This works starts to explore possible methodologies and cartographic languages for collecting and displaying olfactory datasets.