Landscape Memories by French artist and designer Coco Brun is an olfactory installation of three ceramic sculptures that diffuse distinct fragrances. It was developed during the D.Puglia residency, curated by Gordana Zgonjanin, from research into Puglia’s coastline — where erosion and the shifting relationship between land and sea continually reshape the terrain.
The sculptures take their forms from caves and underground geological formations, and their surface patterns are derived from 3D scans of Puglian caves, reproduced through ceramic extrusion developed and produced in Milan with SuperForma.
The fabrication keeps its own mistakes
A programmed printing process builds the surfaces layer by layer. What the piece does with that process is the interesting decision: the clay’s behaviour during printing, drying and firing produces visible drips, twists and irregularities, and they are kept.
This is the right call for this subject and it is not the default one. Printed ceramic is usually fought — the brief is a clean object, and the drips, the slump, the way a wall leans before it sets are defects to be tuned out through slower feeds and better supports. Keeping them means the object carries a record of its own making, in material terms, right next to a surface geometry that is a record of a cave’s making in geological terms.
Two kinds of slow deformation, at wildly different timescales, in the same wall. For work whose subject is erosion, that is the argument rather than a happy accident.
The sculptures also share a modular system that can be assembled in different configurations, with integrated openings letting air and fragrance circulate — so the geometry is doing structural, compositional and pneumatic work at once.
The scents, and the one that isn’t there
Brun collaborated with perfumer Laurène Sourdillon of Givaudan Paris on three fragrances — Marino, Terra and Bosco: sea, earth, and Mediterranean vegetation. Each can be experienced separately within its corresponding sculpture.
Then the part that makes this more than three scented objects:
As the scents circulate simultaneously through the exhibition space, they overlap to create a fourth olfactory impression that was never composed independently. Its perception changes with air currents, visitors’ positions, and the timing of the experience.
An uncomposed fourth work, produced by the room.
This is a genuinely unusual compositional position, and it is worth separating from the familiar version of it. Plenty of installations claim that the visitor completes the piece; usually that means the visitor triggers something, or chooses a path, and the authored possibilities are enumerable. Here the fourth impression is not in anyone’s control, including the artist’s — it is set by the ventilation, the volume of the room, the weather outside, the number of bodies absorbing and disturbing the air, and the sequence in which you happened to walk past the three sources.
Olfaction is the right medium for that, for a physical reason. Smell does not composite like light or sound. You can predict a mixed colour, and you can predict two tones sounding together. Mixed odorants interact at the receptor level — masking each other, suppressing each other, and producing percepts that are not describable as the sum of their parts. The fourth scent is not a blend of three scents. It is a different thing, and nobody can know in advance what it is.
The diffusion hardware
The fragrances are released through ORB, a dry-air olfactory diffusion device developed by Genius Loci and integrated into the sculptures. Each rechargeable sphere has an artisan-crafted perforated casing inspired by organic forms found in the landscape.
Dry-air diffusion is the technically correct choice over the more familiar alternatives. Heat degrades aromatic compounds and shifts a composition as it runs; ultrasonic nebulisers put water into the air, which changes both how the scent reads and what it does to ceramics and to a gallery. Dry air moves the material without cooking it or wetting the room — which is also what makes a long exhibition run viable without the scent drifting away from what the perfumer approved.
Where and when
Presented at Villa Saporiti during the Lake Como Design Festival 2026, as part of Border / Confine, curated by Giovanna Massoni and Francesca Prandelli.
The project is being developed further, with redesigned sculptures and new textile and graphic works planned to extend it across two and three dimensions in 2027 presentations.