楠尚子 / Naoko Kusunoki

Based between Tokyo and Kyoto, I work at the intersection of contemporary art, fragrance, and language centered on the sense of smell. Rather than treating scent merely as an expressive medium, I approach it as an "unstable language" whose meaning is generated within relationships, developing this into forms such as installation, performance, and workshops. In recent years, in collaboration with the Sydney-based artist Nadia Vitlin, I have been presenting a body of work themed around scent, memory, misreading, and untranslatability, centered on the project «Olfactophone», which regards fragrance as a relational language. This project is also my first attempt at developing an artist book — an effort to reconstruct, into the form of paper, elements I have so far handled on an exhibition and project basis.

The book I plan to exhibit is an artist book that takes "Olfactophone / One Side of a Conversation" as its point of departure. This work is not a record of a work but is composed of fragments of the making process, scent-testing strips, envelopes, folded structures, insert cards, scent samples, and more. The pages themselves are a medium that records information while also standing up as a physical structure — designed as a "Portable Exhibition." The book has no fixed order or single reading; it comes into being as notes spring out, scents hide away, and fragments are inserted. This structure itself is an attempt to materially implement the relationships-through-partial-understanding found in "Olfactophone." It is planned as a hand-bound work in a limited, small edition.

Works of scent vanish once the exhibition ends. The conversations exchanged in a workshop, the experience of smelling a fragrance — these belong only to that moment. «Olfactophone», too, is a project that places its value in the process of exchange itself rather than in a finished work. For that reason, there is much that photographs or text alone cannot fully preserve. This time, I regard the book not as a medium for conveying information but as an object that comes with scent, material, and touch. The reason I use scent-testing strips and insert-type parts is not so that the book can be read, but so that it can be opened, touched, drawn out, and smelled. Precisely because we live in an age where digital recording is so easy, I wanted to preserve something that cannot be fully reproduced — like scent — in a limited, handmade form. Incomplete, inefficient, and impossible for anyone to experience identically. That state overlaps with the "communication through partial understanding" that «Olfactophone» explores. This book is not a record of the work but exists as an extension of the work itself.

From the outset, I conceived of this work as a structure that would not fit the format of an ordinary art book or zine and its extensions. It can have pages, but it is not premised on being circulated lightly or shared as a uniform reading experience; rather, I felt a need to redefine the very form of the "book" itself. Amid this, I learned of this fair and became strongly interested in its stance of trying to expand the very form of the "book," and its attempt to update the framework of production and circulation. It proceeds from premises different from those of the conventional art-book framework, and in that respect I sense a possibility of connection with this project. Delivering the work to a place like Iga is not about leaving behind urban speed or the center of existing contexts; rather, it is an act of testing how a work is reconstituted under different conditions. The very form of an art book fair is a device that produces not distribution but "encounter," and within it I want to experiment with how a book gets misread and has its meaning updated.