[ongoing]

The Commute: Journeys of a Pocket Scent

dry wax cotton, paper

A commute means to travel some distance between one’s home and place of work on a regular basis. An everyday circumstance that so many of us attend daily, yet experience in multifaceted ways. The Commute: Journeys of a Pocket Scent is a public archive and scented installation series that documents the individual and collective experiences of commuting to work.

The Commute collects stories from individuals, and documents the interactions they have with their clothing, spaces, people, sights and smells while on route to work, school, home and other places of connection. The project celebrates the mundane, everyday commute whilst interrogating the socio-cultural and political structures of these daily endeavours, using clothing and scent as tools to explore these journeys.

The Commute starts with a selection of digital postcards, carefully inscribed with individual scent journeys from around the world. The physical collection includes a series of public installations, fashion artefacts and carefully designed objects that together ask important questions about how we live our everyday. How can clothes and scent build communities? What is the role of fashion and fragrance in a post-individual world? What will we wear during our future commutes? What will we smell? Or, more importantly, what smells will be lost?

This is an ongoing project by Morag Seaton in collaboration with perfumers Samyak Varia and Xinning Zhao, The Royal College of Art, ISIPCA, and IFF (International Flavours and Fragrance) Europe. Sponsored by Halley Stevensons Ltd.