Objects in ceramics and material mix
Landscape Memories
2026
Landscape Memories is an installation composed of three ceramic sculptures, each accompanied by three olfactory compositions. The project takes the Mediterranean landscape as its starting point, and more specifically the coastline of Puglia in southern Italy, a territory marked by soil erosion and an unstable relationship between land and sea.
The project considers the landscape not as a stable surface, but as a territory in constant transformation. The ground shifts, coastlines erode, species circulate, and human activity progressively alters environments. In this context, the border is not a fixed line: it becomes a zone of contact and transformation between different elements.
The three sculptures take their forms from caves and underground geological formations. They evoke a landscape beneath the surface, gradually shaped by pressure, erosion, and the movement of matter.
Their fabrication extends this idea of transformation. The sculptures are produced using a 3D ceramic extrusion process, which builds each piece layer by layer from a programmed trajectory. The machine’s path directly forms the surface of the piece. It never returns exactly to the same point: with each turn, the path shifts and creates a continuous torsion along the form. The same modules can therefore evolve differently depending on their position and assembly, allowing for a wide variety of configurations from the same system.
Once printed, the form continues to evolve. The clay settles under its own weight, contracts as it dries, and transforms again during firing. The final sculpture retains the traces of these successive transformations. It results from a balance between a programmed trajectory and what the material produces unpredictably.
The three sculptures use the same library of modules, assembled in three different configurations developed in partnership with SuperForma srl, Milan. Openings are integrated into their structures to allow air to circulate through the pieces. This porosity is also functional: it allows the scents to move through the sculptures using an integrated ventilation system and the ORB diffusion system by Genius Loci. The structure of the sculptures thus becomes both a physical form and a system for air and scent circulation.
The three olfactory compositions were developed with perfumer Laurène Sourdillon / Givaudan Paris. Each corresponds to a dimension of the landscape: the sea, the earth, and Mediterranean flora. They do not seek to reproduce a single scent of the landscape, but to evoke several of its components coexisting within the same territory.
The three scents are diffused simultaneously through the sculptures. They move through the space, meet, and blend according to air currents. Their combination produces a fourth scent, which is not composed in advance. It emerges from the interaction of the three original compositions. Like a natural landscape, where the scents of vegetation, earth, rock, water, and air combine, this new scent changes according to the visitor’s position, the movement of air, and the moment of the experience.
This principle of combination reflects the way a landscape functions. A territory is not made up of isolated elements, but of relationships between soil, water, plants, air, and the organisms that inhabit it.
Scent introduces an invisible and mobile material into the installation. Unlike sculpture, which has a physical form and structure, scent moves through space, crosses boundaries, and resists precise delimitation. It becomes another way of thinking about the border: not as a separation, but as a space of passage and interaction.
In Landscape Memories, the border is therefore not a fixed limit, but a space of transformation. It shifts between land and sea, surface and underground, visible and invisible.
The sculptures and scents make this changing landscape perceptible: a territory that is continuously transforming.
Perfume: Laurène Sourdillon, Givaudan
Project partner / Producer: SuperForma srl, Milan
Olfactory device: ORB by Genius Loci
Bio
Coco Brun is a French multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the relationships between matter, memory, and transformation. Through sculpture, textile, 3D printing, and scent, she creates sensory environments in which landscapes appear as unstable systems shaped by erosion, time, and cultural circulation.
Her work investigates how forms emerge, disappear, and continuously recompose themselves. Combining artisanal craftsmanship with digital technologies, she translates natural phenomena — collapse, sedimentation, and porosity — into sculptural and olfactory forms. Materials become carriers of memory, holding invisible traces and slow transformations.
During a residency in Puglia in 2025, she explored cliffs, pine forests, beaches, and Mediterranean scrublands, collecting not objects to preserve, but sensory fragments: smells, textures, patterns, colours, and geological forms. This research led to Landscape Memories, an installation in which scent is considered a medium in its own right, alongside ceramics, textiles, and sculpture.
Her work does not seek to reconstruct a landscape, but rather to evoke an unstable memory situated between presence and disappearance, surface and depth. Through her installations, Coco Brun approaches landscape as a living threshold — a space where the boundaries between nature and culture, organic and artificial, memory and transformation remain in constant flux.
“I do not define myself as an ecological artist. I work within a constant tension around questions of landscape, collapse, transformation, and our relationship to the living world. I try to open spaces for reflection rather than provide answers. For me, art proves nothing. It reveals.”