Perfume is much more than a fragrant item. It is a potent vessel for ancestral stories, organic materiality and cultural knowledge. Perfume-making has existed across South Asia for more than 2000 years–long before the French method dominated modern-day commercial fragrances. Likewise, the ancient art of making incense carries its own rituals and techniques that continue to spark bright.
This spring, we invite you to follow your nose to Magenta House on Sunday 4 October for a paper incense-making workshop with Indian-Australian researcher, anthropologist and perfumer Giti Datt (Guna Natural).
In this class, we will spend real time with natural aromatics–including some of the oldest and rarest on Earth–while learning about the rich histories and rituals associated with these scents. We will engage with ideas about seasonality, understanding how we can use scent to augment the atmosphere of spring.
You will learn how to identify different ways of smell: How can we sit with a scent, evaluate it? What happens to our body when activated by a scent? This class is not this is not about being a perfume connoisseur–it’s more about tuning into our own personal sense of smell.
Finally, Giti will teach you how to customise your own spring perfume and turn this into paper incense. Incense made from paper is one of the least common forms of incense and the most ephemeral. It burns only for a few minutes and shifts the atmosphere of a room immediately. It’s an ideal tool for cleansing a room, getting rid of cooking odours, or marking the beginning or end of a cycle.
Seats are limited due to the intimate nature of this session. Drinks & snacks provided.
Bios 🐣
Giti Datt is an anthropologist and perfumer with a deep interest in how we experience the world. Through ethnographic research, Giti has been studying the attar (distilled perfume oil) industry in North India, learning about the people, plants and processes that collaborate to make these beautiful aromatics. For the last decade she has been developing her own method and practice of perfumery, reinterpreting historic South Asian perfume aesthetics. She creates immersive scentscapes and perfumes, and run workshops and talks to share her knowledge.
11am – 2pm
