Museum of the Army
Plunge the visitor into the Napoleonic campaigns
For a visit dedicated to Napoleon, the Army Museum wanted to bring visitors closer to the experience experienced by the soldiers. Beyond the uniforms, objects and stories, it was about making them imagine very concretely the environments of the countryside: the powder of a battlefield, the presence of horses, the heat and dust of the desert.
From an initial brief containing four tracks, Cinquième Sens and the museum selected three olfactory atmospheres capable of immersing the visitor in this sensitive reality: the battlefield, the stables, and the desert. The itinerary does not seek to once again explain history, but to make the visitors experience what the soldiers could have felt around them.
The «battlefield» agreement includes gunpowder and rifle powder. The «stable» agreement evokes the presence of the horse, omnipresent in the military life of the time. Finally, the «desert» agreement evokes a sensation of warm sand, dust and dry air. These evocations do not purport to reproduce an historical scent exactly; they provide the visitor with sensory landmarks to project themselves into the narrative.
The three agreements were packaged in fifteen pill-shaped containers containing polymer beads, with the necessary elements for their storage and use during the mediation. The packaging, the concentration and the number of items were designed with as much care as the olfactory writing itself.
The visit then takes on another density. The smells bring the body back to the heart of the narrative and allow us to immediately grasp what the objects on display cannot reproduce alone: the physical environment in which the soldiers evolved.
Cinquième Sens Studio transforms the sense of smell into a narrative element: three atmospheres are enough to make a page of history feel closer, more physical and more memorable.
