Marinetti and Futurism — Rijksmuseum Twenthe 2024 · Enschede

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Some movements cannot be understood through images alone.

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For the exhibition Marinetti and Futurism at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, four unique fragrances were developed to capture the spirit of the Italian avant-garde — a movement defined by speed, provocation, and radical ambition, but also by profound contradiction. The scents were presented in refined glass bottles with a specially developed spray system, allowing visitors to experience them safely throughout the exhibition and over time.

Futurism is not a comfortable subject. Born from utopian idealism, it became entangled with fascism in ways that Marinetti himself navigated pragmatically and often ambiguously throughout his life. The exhibition did not shy away from this complexity — and neither did the fragrances. Each scent was designed to evoke a dimension of the movement: its energy, its aesthetics, its era, and the tension between revolutionary art and political reality.

Scent and the avant-garde

The Futurists were obsessed with sensory experience. Speed, noise, light, movement — they wanted art to overwhelm the senses and break with everything that came before. Adding scent to an exhibition about Futurism was not a decorative choice. It was a conceptual one: to engage visitors through the very sense the Futurists themselves celebrated, and to make a century-old ideology feel immediate and present.

This was the most recent museum project in a body of work that spans nearly two decades — and one of the most conceptually demanding.