Valeria Zhuravleva
The Smell of Home

Where a building’s façade is its public declaration, the stairwell in a block of flats is a blind spot in the urban environment—a space that is passed through every day but not noticed and even excluded from the narrative of our lives. The Smell of Home puts this “invisible witness”, ignored by normative regulation and our customary view of urban spaces, back into the spotlight.

Using five types of residential buildings in Saint Petersburg representing the tsarist, Stalinist, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and contemporary periods, the project explores the stairwell in its roles as both the starting point of a building and the ending point of the city outside. These transitory spaces build up a palette of odours deriving from countless lived scenarios, turning them into spaces of concentrated human presence.

The work questions the boundary between isolation and community, investigating how a smell that has seeped into the walls shapes our perception of a space and captures an invisible imprint of the urban community. While the outdoors tend towards sterility and uniformity, the stairwell is a meeting point between the private and the communal, providing access to an authentic bodily experience of the city.

*This project was developed in conjunction with the perfumer Olesya Dukhnovskaya