If an ethereal falsetto singing in an invented language wafted into your ears sometime over the last three decades, chances are good that it was Jónsi’s. But the Icelandic singer and multi-instrumentalist behind the post-rock band Sigur Rós is also invested in another immersive, ephemeral medium: He creates perfume with his sisters Lilja, Inga, and Sigurrós Birgisdóttir as Fischersund, an art collective based in Reykjavík.

Fischersund: Faux Flora, the collective’s first exhibition, arrives at Seattle’s National Nordic Museum on the heels of FLÓÐ, Jónsi’s scented exhibition hosted by the museum in 2023. This show feels entirely distinct, though. Faux Flora envelops the viewer—or experiencer, rather—in a multisensory display of the chapters of human life through the lens of imagined plants, which are paired with scent blends and soundscapes. 

Ahead of the exhibit’s opening, I spoke with Jónsi, Lilja, Inga, and National Nordic Museum chief curator Leslie Anderson about scent blending, botanical treatises, the climate crisis, and their favorite Icelandic plants.

Faux Flora is the first exhibition by Fischersund as a collective. What sparked your family’s interest in perfumery? How did that practice evolve into multimedia art?

Jónsi: I started perfuming around 15 years ago.

Inga Birgisdóttir: He was always showing us his creations, and we were amazed, but he was never happy with anything. Finally, we kind of bullied him into releasing one scent! 

Lilja Birgisdóttir: We’re all artists—musicians, perfumers, visual artists, photographers—so it was always a dream for us to create something bigger together. [Jónsi] had this house in downtown Reykjavík where he’d had his private studio, making music and perfumes. Then he moved his studio to LA, so it was empty. So we painted the walls black, put some art on the walls, had music playing, and that was about it. That’s how [our perfumery] started. 

Did each of you have specific roles in the creation of Faux Flora, or was it more of a collaborative process?

Jónsi: This is all collaborative, but we have our own strengths.

I’m curious how the sculptural, scented, graphic, and photographic elements in Faux Flora are brought together. What can someone expect when they walk into the museum space?

Inga: The exhibition shares the life cycle of a flowering plant: germination, growth, flowering, seed formation, and seed dispersal. We are kind of…

Jónsi: Mirroring.

Inga: Yeah, mirroring that process in human life: birth, growth, adolescence, adulthood, and death. The flowers are categorized in these five different chapters throughout the exhibition. 

Lilja: You can expect to see some video works, hand-colored photographs, sculptures, music, and deconstructed scents. Each flower has its own scent and soundscape.

Leslie Anderson: To situate this idea within the context of art history and natural science, [we were] thinking about this exhibition in relation to botanical treatises. These had so many different functions, but they were really a way to describe the natural world. Faux Flora is a clever response to that type of text, which would bear beautiful illustrations by artists but also contain descriptions of plants and communicate the experience of being with that example of plant life to anyone in the world. In this case, Fischersund takes it so much further because you can smell the plants. You can hear them in their environment. 

Faux Flora was inspired by the 500 native plant species in Iceland, but the show invents new plant species. How does that process of invention work?

Jónsi: Icelandic plant life was a starting point, but it evolved from our imagination, our emotions, our memories.

Do any of you have a favorite Icelandic native plant?

Jónsi: Fífa is very cool. [Eriophorum angustifolium, common cottongrass.]

Inga: I also like Arctic root [Rhodiola rosea], which is like a super-plant. It’s really good for you, good for your memory. It smells really sweet.

Lilja: Chervil [Anthriscus cerefolium]—an Icelandic plant with a licorice scent. We have it in our teas and in the perfume.

Jónsi: We use a lot of Icelandic pine in our perfumes, too.

Curating a show with scent elements sounds like a unique challenge. Leslie, I’m curious how you integrate scent into a public space.

Leslie: There are lengthy conversations that we have to have on staff—concerns about our HVAC system, ensuring that the scent is impactful and soliciting the response that artists want, but with nothing dispersed in the atmosphere that could compromise other objects in the museum. It takes a lot of creative problem-solving to determine how we can ensure that the viewer is understanding the work in its entirety through their nose, while still operating within museum professional practices.

Scent in exhibitions is a way to elicit an emotional response, to evoke memory. I think that museums need to encourage people to spend time thinking deeply about and responding to works of art. That is an important artistic strategy here. It’s not too dissimilar from Bernini’s 17th-century fusions of the visual—painting, sculpture, architecture—to convey important points, or, in the 19th century, Wagner’s idea of a “total work of art,” or Gesamtkunstwerk. This is a human translation of these ideas wedded with forward-thinking artistic practices to get a full, emotional, physical response from the viewer.

It seems like scent is having a moment in contemporary art. I know FLÓÐ was a huge success; there was a 12.5% increase in museum membership during that time. What’s drawing artists and visitors toward scent as a medium and an experience?

Leslie: Coming out of the pandemic, [viewers were] searching for experiences that transported them. We’re more cognizant of how we spend our time, and we want these moments to be very impactful. I also saw FLÓÐ as a very social exhibition. People spent hours by themselves in the space, but they also appreciated it in groups and talked about it. It allows viewers to experience and share in a way that they weren’t able to in lockdown.

I know seaweed was harvested from the Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans for FLÓÐ, Jónsi. Are there any anchor or primary scents in Faux Flora?

Jónsi: We were mostly excited about the five different stages. It is different from FLÓÐ, which centered on one scent—this is varied.

Lilja: For our “birth” scent, we were thinking about what scents we connect with that period—breast milk, skin, clean clothes. It’s nuanced because we are mirroring the human lifespan—like in childhood, you have the scent of grass-stained pants and candy. In the exhibition, the flowers themselves are hinting at what you’re smelling. 

On the Fischersund website, I noticed how poetically scent is written about—like No. 23 Fragrance, which is rooted in Jónsi’s memories of working by the harbor with his father. That connection between scent and storytelling seems powerful. It’s cool to hear that you’re blending scents that are both unexpected and familiar, like grass and skin.

Lilja: Scent is a universal language. Grass smells the same anywhere in the world, you know? That’s the beautiful thing about smell…

Jónsi: It’s a connector. 

Does this work feel connected to climate change? I’m thinking about plants growing and dying and disappearing. I’m thinking about the ephemerality of our memories. Scent, as you just said, is a universal language—and the state of the climate is a universal crisis. Does that feel resonant?

Inga: Yes—we’re dealing with that every day.  That’s our reality right now. Some of these memories or shared experiences that we are working with are disappearing, too. 

Lilja: For example, we took old books and distilled them into a scent. It was interesting talking to young people about it, [for whom] everything happens on their screens. They didn’t have these connections, and their homes weren’t filled with books. That’s also something that’s changing—physical versus digital.

Leslie: Scent is such an effective tool in conjuring memories. In FLÓÐ, some of the visitor responses that I felt were most powerful were those that reflected on rising flood waters and the climate crisis. But other people talked about how the scents brought them back to their youth in Norway. The show was interpreted differently by every single person. To your question on climate change and the extinction of plant life, I think that this exhibition follows along with botanical treatises and taxonomies, but it’s for the Anthropocene era. It’s memorializing, even though these are “faux” flora. It memorializes plants that we will lose because of human impact.

The process of imagining new plant species makes me think of your practice of singing in your invented Hopelandic language, Jónsi. What feels important about imagining something new in your work?

Jónsi: I think doing something new and exploring is important to all of us. 

Inga: And of course, the world we’re living in—it’s sometimes so bleak. I think it’s important to make some magic.

You have scented concerts planned with Sin Fang and Kjartan Holm as opening receptions for Faux Flora. Do you see any similarities or differences between the perfumery process and the music-making process?

Jónsi: They’re linked. Making music is very… musical. [laughs] But perfume is [more of] a silent process. 

Inga: Both are very layered. These layers make it juicy. 

Jónsi: Both are invisible and abstract but still resonate in some way with everybody. So it’s kind of amazing. It’s magic.

Lilja: Yeah, it is magic. When you use your eyes, you’re so used to being critical. But there’s something about music and scent that goes past those walls. You either like a smell or you hate a smell. It’s the same in music.

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Fischersund: Faux Flora will be installed at the National Nordic Museum through January 26, 2025.