It was late January when Cyprien Gaillard arrived, the time of year when the city is cold and grey. Yet the weather could not dampen his enthusiasm for urban exploration. He could hardly wait to wrap up the installation of his exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts to see Columbus, the state capital of Ohio. In line with his artistic interests in the contradictions of our contemporary landscapes, his list of must-sees included structures and places that others would rather ignore, and sites where contemporary claims to history have given rise to surprising visual manifestations.

We had started the day with a drive-by tour of fraternity and sorority houses — a staple of any North American university campus. Equipped with a Polaroid camera, Cyprien Gaillard began to survey the facades: Clustered together in an area of old, tree-lined streets, the architecture borrowed liberally from various periods and styles: Lily-white, Greco-Roman temple fronts alternated with Colonial-style brick facades, Tudor half-timber and 1960s austerity. The buildings laid bare the friction between the grandiloquent desires of the past and the rather more mundane present. Just as we were about to leave, a handful of student revellers emerged from one of the fraternities with beer cans in hand and posed for a photograph in the brisk morning air.

Mono.Kultur 23 features Norwegian scientist and artist Sissel Tolaas who has dedicated her life and work to the world of smells. And what an issue it’s going to be — Mono.Kultur 23 contains no visual imagery but clears the page for our most primary sense: the magazine is impregnated with 12 scents curated by Sissel Tolaas. And we’re not talking about perfumes either, but what Tolaas would coin ‘difficult smells’. With a special technique called microencapsulation, the scents are literally printed into the magazine — you rub the paper to release them.

Meanwhile, Sissel Tolaas is a phenonemon in herself: born and raised between Norway and Iceland, with degrees from Scandinavia, Poland and Russia in sciences, chemistry and fine arts, Tolaas has become an expert on everything related to scents, odours, smells. She is a professor at Harvard Universiy for invisible communication, while working on hospital and research projects as well as for commercial clients; while exhibiting the results of her research in museums such as the MoMA New York, the National Musem of Beijing or the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. A vibrant and determined character with a unique expertise and biography, Sissel Tolaas is everything we could have hoped for in our forthcoming issue.