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USO: the Perfumed Cloud by Cartier at the Louvre Abu Dhabi

Along the exhibition 10,000 Years of Luxury, the Louvre Abu Dhabi presents an olfactory art installation entitled USO – the Perfumed Cloud (USO: Unidentified Scented Object) from the 30th October 2019 to the 1st February 2020. This innovative experience has been created by Cartier's perfumer Mathilde Laurent with Transsolar KlimaEngineering.

An innovative experience


Lining up the museum's wish to hold innovatives experiences, this installation offers a magical sensory journey through a cloud of perfume. Visitors are invited to enter a transparent glass cube based on water and to climb an helicoidal staircase leading them above the floating cloud. What a unique immersive installation, which is combining immaterial architecture, sensoriality and climate technologies high performances! Inspired by « L'Envol » by Cartier, created by Mathilde Laurent in 2016, this installation rests indeed on a delicate balance: the superposition of three layers of air of different temperatures inside this glass cube. The cloud reveals itself clearly into the space between the lower layer of cold air and the upper layer of warm air. The released perfume can thus be discovered above the cloud, at the top of the stairs.

An exhibit curated by Olivier Gabet


« 10,000 Years of Luxury » presents a history of luxury through 350 objects collected worldwide inviting the public to discover how cultures and civilisations shaped the concept of luxury. By offering a sensorial experience through a cloud, brought out by olfactory emotion, The Perfumed Cloud reminds us that perfume had been - and still is – a precious, luxurious item, as the first cloth on our skin. Its name, stemming from the Latin expression « per fumum » - « through the smoke » - vouches for the ancient religious rites in which scented wooden pieces and resins were burned to carry payers. Then, the perfume, despite its invisibility, was already identified as the medium to elevate human beings and to link them to an immutable, superior order. For a long time, it remained a Pharaohs and Kings' privilege.
Février 2020
By Luxe Magazine