At the Crossroads of Memory

Till Richter Museum, Schloss Buggenhagen, Germany
Solo exhibition, 3 May – 10 August 2025

An interface between individual and collective memory

Certain scents don’t just linger. They live. They stay in the brain, quietly nesting in memory. They carry us across time, bringing us back to places we thought were gone, and sometimes they open doors we didn’t know we had closed. Recent neuroscientific studies confirm that scent is one of the most powerful triggers of memory, with a direct link to emotional, spatial, and temporal perception.

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Researchers like Afif Aqrabawi have shown how the olfactory cortex can store episodic memories, making olfaction a direct bridge to past experience. Smell can carry you across time and place without warning. In this sense, memory is not something we hold; it holds us.

In At the Crossroads of Memory, I return to the scent that shaped my childhood. The unmistakable smell of hay from the Romanian countryside, more precisely from Maramureș, where I used to spend my summers with my grandparents. A scent tied to warmth, to the rhythm of hand tools, to afternoons in the fields watching the hay lifted and turned, before being stacked into the forms only villagers know how to make. It is not just a memory. It is part of who I am.

This exhibition spans two rooms and invites you into my olfactory universe, an autobiographical space that unfolds through scent, image, sound, and material. Central to the installation is the scent of hay from Romania, which triggers involuntary memories, evoking both personal and collective histories. The aroma is shaped by the rich diversity of plants found in the hayfields of Transylvania. This biodiversity, along with the traditional practices surrounding hay, makes its smell not just nostalgic, but a living archive of cultural and ecological history.

I create an immersive environment using scent, fabric from my maternal grandmother’s dowry, plaster, and glass to invite visitors to experience memory as a sensory journey. The Romanian hayfield, with its spiritual and cultural significance, forms an important aspect of the exhibition. As the anthropologist Vintilă Mihăilescu acknowledged, hay plays a pivotal role in Romanian life, shaping beliefs, rituals, and practices, thus becoming a “cultural landscape.” My work reflects this, highlighting the connection between its sensory power and the cultural heritage it carries.

Through the two rooms, visitors will experience memory as something that can be felt, not just thought about. Memory becomes tangible, accessible through the senses: touch, smell, sight, and sound. It is a space where personal memory meets collective history, where scent acts as a bridge to the past.

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At the Crossroads of Memory unfolded across two adjacent rooms, with scent as the first element to greet the visitor. Even from the corridor, the natural smell of hay brought from the Transylvanian countryside filled the space, opening the exhibition through scent rather than sight.

Room one

In the first room, visitors stepped through Meet Me Halfway, a photograph taken by my father when I was three years old and printed on textile. A traditional hay-filled mattress (strujac) lay on the floor accompanied by a sound piece, while hand-blown glass sculptures held scents connected to home and landscape. The textile works were sewn from my grandmother’s dowry from the 1930s, and cyanotypes documented plants from the Transylvanian hayfields.

Visitors could lie down on the strujac, breathe in the scent of hay, and listen through headphones to a two-minute recording of my voice, close to hypnosis in its rhythm, telling the story of the plants and the fabric beneath them and inviting the body to rest.

Hallway

In the hallway, Landscape in Băsești, the only painting in the exhibition, marked the passage between the two rooms. Real hay was worked into its surface, allowing scent to become part of the painting itself.

Room two

The atmosphere shifted in the second room. Blue-filtered light softened the space, while a petrichor-inspired accord created in collaboration with master perfumer Geza Schön evoked the scent of earth after rain. Here, scent became a guiding presence, unfolding before the works were fully seen.

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Reasonable Percentage

Pavilion an der Volksbühne, Berlin
Group exhibition, 2024–2025

Group exhibition presenting Love is Blind, a hand-blown glass sculpture enclosing an artist-created scent exploring the link between smell, memory, and human attraction.

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The Factum

Museo Pietro Canonica at Villa Borghese, Rome, Italy
Solo exhibition, 2021

Exhibition featuring The Eyes of My Dreamed Hearing, the first major showing of this olfactory installation composed of 101 scented plaster ear casts.