Notes of dark green leaves, herbal and aromatic notes, spicy modifiers, floral transparent freshness. These are not field notes from a botanist's journal–they are scent recipes, reconstructed molecule by molecule in a laboratory.

Olfactory Forest documents designer and artist Omer Polak’s attempt to capture the forest’s ancient and invisible language and to translate it into a museum installation. We follow Polak from collecting samples in real forests to analyzing them in the controlled precision of Symrise’s fragrance laboratories, where robots mix thousands of base components into precise recipes guided by both gas chromatography and the human nose.

Part artist portrait, part speculative inquiry, the film reveals how scientific method and sensory intuition attempt to approximate nature’s most overlooked dimension.
 For the Trapholt Museum in Denmark, Polak builds an imagined future scenario where nature has all but vanished. The scents are absorbed into sculpted rattan poles, creating an immersive forest of fragrance. In this austere mirror-walled room, he creates a way of exploring nature differently–giving attention to the subtle nuances that sustain our ecosystem–posing the uncomfortable question to the future: will the smell of a forest become something we can only encounter in a museum?