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Art is subjective, and some may describe it as beautiful while others find it not to their taste. The artist can explain it but that isn’t necessarily how the viewer will accept it. For some people, they think that art simply hangs in galleries, that it is painted or sculpted. The truth is that art can be much simpler, or indeed more complicated. It can be made of many textures and colors, and sometimes none at all.
Brothers Frank and Patrik Riklin attended art school separately, with one heading to Zurich and the other to Berlin. However, they have come back together to create art, and share a studio on the top floor of a factory that once housed textiles. Their Swiss Atelier für Sonderaufgaben is located in St. Gallen near Lake Constance. One of their most interesting works in the past few years is a hotel perched on a Swiss mountain.
Wait, is that a hotel or is it art? To them, it is both, and indeed to the 4,500 people on the waiting list in 2017 - it seems that interpretations don’t really matter. The project is called Null Stern and it is a hotel room without walls or a roof.
The view is spectacular, of course. Those who stay there sleep in a comfortable queen bed, as seen in the photo, and breakfast is delivered by a local farmer, who comes clad in a tuxedo but wears mountain boots. The bathroom is an inconvenient ten minutes away. It is located in Appezellerland, overlooking the Safien Valley. There is an alternative if the weather turns bad, but then it is no longer sleeping in a work of art. Perhaps the experience is moving art?
The brothers have not just created this bedroom, but also made installations in other public spaces.
Image by Getty
The Smells That Take You Back in Time
They say that music has the ability to transport us back to a different place in our lives. That’s true, but don’t smells have exactly the same effect too? What wafts up your nostrils can be just as potent as what you hear. We all have those special, and even not-so-special, aromas that are associated with many and varied points in our lives.
The brand of deodorant we used in high school whizzes us straight back to the locker rooms after gym class. The smell of a pencil being sharpened is a buzz you won’t have had since elementary school. And that strange smell as the glue holding a packet of trading cards is prised apart? Congratulations, you’re ten years old again. What about the smell of a home-cooked meal - does that bring you to your grandmother's kitchen, or perhaps it reminds you of a neighbor's house? Smells are different for different people.
Scents are even used by food stores to sell their products. This may cause your entire belief system to fall apart, but bread isn’t always baked in-store. But the stores use the smell of baking bread from a can to entice you to keep shopping and spending. They know exactly what they’re doing because they know the human brain equates the smell with freshness and good quality produce! The next time you get that smell of freshly baked bread, check if you can really see where it's coming from!
We’ve only got five senses and they’re all as acute and finely tuned as each other. It’s no surprise that what we smell should rank alongside the food and drinks we can taste, the artifacts we can touch, the sounds we can hear, and the things we can see as a way of bringing it all back. Having a powerful sense of smell is as important as what we see in front of us, especially when something is burning.
