Rose Nordin and Brighter Futures present A Ritual for Playing in the Rain the Way We Used To, a new exhibition at Auto Italia, opening 3 November, 6–8pm.

This exhibition is the culmination of a collaboration between Auto Italia participation artist-in-residence Rose Nordin and collaborators from Brighter Futures, a group of young migrants supported by Praxis and Kazzum Arts. Working with scent, the project explores how fragrance can hold memories, evoke places and create connections beyond spoken language.

Across a series of workshops, the collaborators have explored scents connected to places that are important to them, including homes and places shared with loved ones. Working between smell, words, colour, drawing and print, they have experimented with how scent can be remembered, described and given visual form. Each collaborator has developed their own fragrance, creating scents that carry personal memories and associations from one place to another.

Scent becomes a way of keeping memories and experiences: creating keepsakes that hold traces of places, landscapes, climates and feelings. At a time when migration is increasingly talked about through negative narratives, the project looks to scent as a way of carrying memories and histories across languages, cultures and distance.

Rose works with the fragrances, drawings, words and reflections produced through the workshops, developing the collaborators’ ideas through graphic design, the publication and the exhibition. Building on the group’s work with smell, Rose has developed a “scent alphabet” that gives visual form to the different scents explored and the fragrances made by collaborators. This “scent alphabet” gives each scent its own visual symbol, and will appear throughout the exhibition and publication.

A new pocket-sized, scented publication, A Cloud in the Fold of the Elbow, brings together the fragrances, drawings, words and reflections created by the collaborators through the workshops. Alongside documenting their work with scent and the making of their own fragrances, the publication connects this work with Rose’s wider research and includes new texts and interviews about scent by Ezra-Lloyd Jackson, Amrita Dhallu and Sarah Shin, edited by Lillian Wilkie.

The publication title comes from the idea that the fold of the elbow is a place where a person’s particular scent can gather and linger. The ‘cloud’ evokes the way scent can spread through the air and travel from one place to another, carrying memories and connections with it.

The exhibition brings these different parts of the project together in the gallery, with the collaborators’ fragrances present throughout the work and infused into the publication and other visual materials. Their drawings, scents and reflections move beyond the page, taking new forms through Rose’s graphic and installation work.

A public programme of events and practical training sessions will accompany the exhibition, bringing together conversations around migration with knowledge-sharing on rights, entitlements, the immigration and asylum system, and trauma-informed practice.

The programme is commissioned and produced by Auto Italia, in partnership with Brighter Futures, with generous support from The National Lottery Community Fund and Arts Council England.

Brighter Futures is a project with a long history of supporting young people facing immigration issues to have a voice. Membership is open to young migrants aged 18-25 and they meet weekly at Praxis to share their thoughts, get creative, plan campaigns and events, play games, have fun and eat delicious food together. Through providing a supportive, safe space for young people to speak about the issues that affect them, Brighter Futures enables young migrants to take the lead in creating social change as well as supporting each other through the challenges they face.

Rose Nordin is a British–Malay research-based artist and graphic designer from London. Her practice examines publication and other instigations of knowledge production through installation, print, metalwork, and emergent olfactory forms. She traces how materials carry systems of governance, devotion, and ecological imagination.

With a focus on Southeast Asian archipelagic and speculative thinking, her research follows the migration of botanical and animal specimens through colonial trade routes between Southeast Asia and Europe.

Rose is based between Kuala Lumpur and London and is a Fellow at the Centre for Art and Design Research. She is currently engaged in the British Council Connections Through Culture initiative with the Malaysian Design Archive and is exhibiting at Traces as part of the Toronto Design Festival.

Praxis is an award-winning human rights charity fighting for migrant rights since 1983. They give advice, provide support, and campaign so that migrants and refugees in the UK can live with safety, dignity and respect.

Kazzum Arts uses creativity to enable children and young people who have been impacted by trauma and adversity to feel seen, heard and valued. They do this by providing opportunities to explore creative expression and agency through multidisciplinary arts activities.

They work with young people who have experienced high levels of Adverse Childhood Experiences. Their programmes use creative activities as a means of building confidence, communication skills, and engagement in learning.