Scent Companion to Olfactory Worldmaking
by Hsuan L. Hsu
(without book)Release date: 31 August
by Hsuan L. Hsu
(without book)Release date: 31 August
This Scent Companion includes:
- Four 2ml scent vials
- Set of reference cards
- Eight sampling strips
Scent Companion is a series bringing together writers, artists, and perfumers to expand how audiences can engage directly with scent in writing and art. Through existing fragrance, newly commissioned scent works, and scent sketches, each Scent Companion accompanies and responds to a text or artwork, allowing smell to be experienced and archived.
The first edition expands upon Olfactory Worldmaking by Hsuan L. Hsu, professor of English at the University of California, Davis. The smells articulated in Hsu’s seminal text are brought to life through four scents responding to each chapter of the book, with contributions from artists and perfumers agustine zegers, Warren Cariou, Tanaïs, Justin Charles, and Alessandra Mondin.
In Olfactory Worldmaking, Hsu traces how olfactive experience operates across visceral, material, and affective registers to create new ways of relating, challenging the extractive logics of racial and colonial capitalism. Bringing together environmental humanities, sensory studies, and critical ethnic studies, Hsu demonstrates how scent animates suppressed histories. Hsu theorises olfaction as a speculative, reparative practice. Examining projects from historical novels, memoirs, and speculative fiction to conceptual art and experimental perfumes, he reveals how these works mobilise scent to imagine alternative ways of sensing, relating, and creating more equitably liveable worlds.
Tar Sands by agustine zegers with Warren Cariou
Working with Cariou, whose practice as an artist and scholar Hsu discusses in the introduction to Olfactory Worldmaking, zegers explores the smell of bitumen, foraged from Indigenous lands in the Athabasca tar sands region of Canada and used by Cariou as part of his photographic development process.
Mala by Tanaïs
Mala, a perfume, is an ode to Tanaïs’ memories of old haunts and scents encountered in her time in New Delhi. Hsu explores her practice of perfuming in Chapter One of Olfactory Worldmaking. Eschewing traditional notions of bourgeois travelogue, she sees the perfume as a vasana or embodied memory, resisting the traps of the exoticisation of her ancestry that are ever-present in Western perfumery.
Rootworker’s Worktable by Justin Charles, after Renée Stout
Drawing inspiration from Stout’s installation of the same title explored in Chapter Two of Olfactory Worldmaking, Charles looks to scents encountered in Hoodoo, a system of spiritual beliefs, traditions, and practices developed by enslaved African Americans. Central to both Stout’s work and Charles’ response to it is the smell of High John the Conqueror root, a botanical used in Hoodoo practice.
Queer Intimacies by Alessandra Mondin, after Octavia Butler
In the final chapter of Olfactory Worldmaking, Hsu writes that ‘Butler imagines how the visceral and nonvolitional qualities of olfaction might function to expand kinship networks and build alternate futures.’ Mondin looks to Butler’s allegorical science fiction novels to respond to themes of queerness, belonging, and otherness. Novels such as Fledgling speak to olfactive and molecular modes of recognition that Mondin uses to create scented entanglements of community.
Scent Companion to Olfactory Worldmaking produced by Dean’s Bottom, London in collaboration with Hsuan L. Hsu.
The scents are an educational resource only and not for cosmetic use.
Hsuan L. Hsu
Hsuan L. Hsu is the author of The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics (NYU, 2020), Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury, 2024), Olfactory Worldmaking (Minnesota, 2026), and (with Sal Nicolazzo) a long-form essay on ‘Candice Lin and Colonialism's Promiscuous Materials’ (Andy Warhol Foundation, forthcoming). He is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis.
agustine zegers
Warren Cariou
Warren Cariou is a professor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film and Media at the University of Manitoba. He was born in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, into a family of Métis and European heritage. Though he has lived away from Meadow Lake for many years, his art and academic work maintains a focus on the cultural and environmental questions that have preoccupied the people of his homeland. His books, films, photography, and scholarly research explore themes of community, environment, orality, and belonging in the Canadian west, with particular focus on the relationships between Indigenous stories and the land.
Tanaïs
Tanaïs (née Tanwi Nandini Islam) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and perfumer/founder of the independent artisan house, Studio Tanaïs. They are the author of In Sensorium: Notes for My People, which won the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, and offers an alternative history of South Asia through the lens of scent. Their critically acclaimed queer coming-of-age debut novel, Bright Lines, was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize. Their writing and perfumes have been featured in T Magazine MENA, Vogue, Vogue India, Cosmopolitan Middle East, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, The Cut, The Nation, and more. Their forthcoming speculative fiction novel, Stellar Smoke, will be published in October 2026 by Dutton Books.
Justin Charles
Justin Charles is a perfumer and the founder of Jean Robert, an artisan fragrance house. He is based in Jersey City.