Body Odour
On December 28, 1989, a slim young woman named Susanne Böden was handing out leaf lets in East Berlin with her little sister. The leaf lets promoted f ree speech for citizens of the Deutsche Democratic Republic. Shortly after she started handing them out, Susanne was arrested by the Stasi, or East German secret police. She stood trial at Stasi headquarters in East Berlin and was served with a caution. Before being released, the Stasi gave her a square of fabric to wipe against the back of her neck. This fabric was then kept by the Stasi in a sealed jar with her name on it.
A person’s body odour is as distinctive and traceable as a fingerprint. The Stasi tracked the movements of suspected dissenters with trained sniffer dogs. To get the scent of their suspects, the Stasi employed a variety of methods such as breaking into apartments and stealing dirty clothes or sitting suspects in a heated room for questioning. The Stasi would then save a patch of fabric from this chair’s upholstery that had absorbed the suspect’s body odour.
The Berlin Wall f ell within months of Susanne’s trial. During the ensuing celebrations Stasi Headquarters were ransacked. Inside a small room at the headquarters, revellers found hundreds of jars labelled with people’s names and stuffed with bits of fabric.
Scent by Maki Ueda
(text by Robert Blackson, curator)
What I've made for this exhibition was the scent of body odor; the scent of East Germany citizen that got captured his/her own body odor without being aware of it.
Body odor collection, Stasi Museum, Berlin Germany
Like I always do I made the extracts from the scratch. We smell of what we eat, so I've used whatever I could find in the kitchen.
