Eyes can be closed, but the nose cannot be switched off. To breathe is to smell. And while visual stimuli reach our brain only via a complex transmission process, olfactory stimuli affect us more immediately — and often without our knowledge. This invisible architecture surrounding us is the starting point for Elodie Pong's project, which explores its many facets at the interface between fiction and reality, both in an exhibition at the Helmhaus Zürich and in this publication. Scents are essential signifiers and metaphors for our liquid modernity. Subtly, smell is involved in every aspect of culture, playing its role as an unspoken link between people, objects and places — a kind of invisible means of communication. Perfume and odours spread across boundaries that normally separate fields as diverse as marketing, identity politics, history, philosophy, scientific ethics, neurology, genetic modification, globalization and questions of sexuality and gender. This book connects various disciplines to reflect on the complex role of smell as a fluid vector for identity, myth and memory, post-evolutionary science, body synthesis, capitalism, power and brand politics.