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Photo: Lennard Kugeler

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Oláfur Eliasson

Scent Tunnel

A sensory experience

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Every spring something utterly magical happens in the Autostadt park: Olafur Eliasson’s spectacular contemporary art work, the Scent Tunnel, is reconstructed. And every month, until the onset of autumn, the tunnel is brought back to life with a variety of plants.

Forming a bridge across the little waterway between the Audi and Lamborghini Pavilions, the tunnel is both space and sculpture, a metaphor for mobility and immobility, for movement and a rootedness within the park. In spring and summer the scent of flowering plants invites visitors to be part of a unique combination of art, nature and technology as the gently-rotating tube revolves slowly on its longitudinal axis. At the beginning of the season 2160 densely planted flower pots filled with wallflowers revolve around the visitor enfolding them in their scent. Then come tufted violets, vanilla and lavender.

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The Scent Tunnel is a holistic sensory experience: from smell and sight to the experience of the moving space. We are faced with a new view of the world and consequently the way we perceive things is questioned. In the artist’s words: “if contrary to everything we are used to we have to enter a rotating object to experience it fully, we become that artwork’s co-producer”.