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.

July does not have any art school or professional training — but nor is she wholly self-taught, having learned from and alongside an improvised network of artists, musicians, and writers she has worked with over the last fifteen years. After dropping out of college, July moved to Portland, where she lived for the next decade. She began performing spoken-word pieces at rock clubs; gradually, she transitioned into alternative art spaces, telling ever more complex stories that integrated audience participation and visuals ranging from slide shows to digital video.

During this time, she also founded Joanie 4 Jackie (formerly Big Miss Moviola). Joanie 4 Jackie was a non-commercial distribution system for women video-makers in the pre-YouTube mid-1990s. Any woman could submit a video short and July would put it onto a compilation tape with nine other videos; she then re-circulated these new ‘chain letter’ tapes so each video-maker could see what others were making. Joanie 4 Jackie was an explicitly feminist project, stemming from the anti-consumerist ethos of third wave feminism. Feminist concerns are also evident in July’s early short video works, which explored mother/daughter dynamics, voyeurism, and female spectatorship. In her videos The Amateurist and Nest of Tens, her characters hunt for or establish patterns, imposing their own personal systems of control onto the bewildering world around them. She extended these themes of unexpected longing and loss in Me and You, her short stories, and her recent performances.