I have recently found myself in multiple conversations about the lack of spaces that foster genuine connection and community among artists. While these conversations have taken place in London, they point towards a broader cultural symptom.
We are increasingly spending time in spaces simulating depth, with each venue producing only shinier and shinier metallic countertop surfaces in listening bars. These ‘immersive’ experiences are indeed aesthetically beautiful, yet they feel hollow and leave you yearning vis à vis their promise of connection. Over time, you start to observe these spaces from outside your body, growing tired with material unconnected to any sense other than the eye. The aesthetic of wellness belongs to the same shared surge of polished materials and curated feeling-states that control rather than deepen experience.
Wellness today treads a fine line between feeding consumerism and performing the opposite of its meaning: optimising away the possibility of a range of emotional states. These spaces command you to be calm, gently imprisoning you on the other side of emotional movement. It is an aggressive order, tying you down to a stillness and softness which is artificial. Aware of it or not, you become the outside marketer of ‘immersive’ experiences without experiencing any of its supposed immersion.
At a salon event hosted by the House of KOKO, ONBOUND, the air did not brand connection with the familiar wellness symbolism. I encountered the work of olfactory artist Misia-O’ (Marie Camara). One thing I immediately felt - and hadn’t in a while, was that I wasn’t being told how and what to feel, and I was spared being directed towards mindfulness. I was fascinated by Misia-O’ and her refusal of the word ‘immersive’: a saturated word which has spread its meaning thinly between people’s mouths.
Misia-O’ runs the Off-RCA collective, infusing artists’ works at exhibitions, and her company Fit Stories creates scents for interior spaces. These specific scents had been created in response to Camilla Barvo’s installation Bosque De Gestos (Gesture Forest), infusing the braided fibre forms and wool of Barvo’s work and deepening the sensory layers of the Invasive Species exhibition at Hypha Studios (June - July 2026).
Misia-O’ describes scent as ‘limbic’ i.e. It gets rid of all the masks. Reactions at her gallery events are pre-rational: the ‘I love this’ or ‘smells like shit’ come out instantly, bypassing analysis before being packaged into fearful and bland socially digestible whispers. Misia-O’s bold play with scent exposes the childlike charge running through composed adult exteriors. These charges reach out their hands to connect. It is electric and it spreads; as Misia-O says, ‘scent has to be political: it is democratic.’
A large part of Misia-O’s work starts from pain. One of her first scents was made for a friend’s child with cancer; she researched plants associated with serenity and placed a diffuser in his cottage, elevating his mood. Another was created after a girl approached her at a gallery event: ‘can you make a scent for my friend who took her own life?’ Misia-O’ accepted, not thinking, as she tells me, about how gut-wrenching this liminal journey would be. Yet, through this process, she materially laid out a path within the chemistry and atoms of the scent itself. It has since accessed a collective grief and spirituality, releasing tears from people at her gallery events who arrive knowing neither the person nor the story that informed the scent. Once, Misia-O’ made the rookie mistake of handing it out to friends at a party. They went home straight after smelling it.
To me it smells like the still depths of the sea. I could attempt at a further description but that would only be a form of intellectual exercise. Scent resists being rendered into language; if it could be adequately described, there would be little reason to gather around it and experience it.
This is not a niche perfumer selling wellness-as-consumerism. Misia-O’s scents compose emotional landscapes. They look the pain point in the eye, embrace it, and give you permission to inhabit complex emotional states rather than optimise them away, carving a pathway into interiority which moves through rational barriers.
At the House of KOKO, Misia-O’s scents arrived as tangible mood boards of fibres and plants, ingestible, paired with their exploration in drink form created by Simone from the House. They broke through bodily barriers and infused our bodies, holding us together deeper. I did not know one person in the room. We were asked to smell different scents, sip after each one, and write our associations of which olfactive journey each took us on. I found the comforting truth that the retrospective journeys of the people around me took us to the same places. Our associations were immediate and shared forming an unasserting and quiet, sensory form of intimacy. Misia-O’s scents opened the collective door and we entered together, showing each other a little more of our interior landscapes than language, with its ease of concealment, would have allowed.
In Misia-O’s words, ‘scent is a time machine’, not only to be transported back to your favourite ex’s embrace, but to a collective place of memory and lived emotion, one which can hold more than two people. Misia-O’ lets you take up that space. It is only the beginning of where her work is going, and it is worth paying attention to.
@misiaophotography
www.misia-o.com