Riccio

Dusk, and a nose pressed to the damp earth.

A hedgehog moves slowly through the wilderness, in no hurry to arrive, searching without a sound. Light comes down in glimmers through the branches. The smell of wild fruit works on it like an invisible thread, drawing it on through the brush and the wind.

Blackcurrant and blackberry carry that thread, dark and tart. Calamansi cuts across them sharp and green. Sugar apple rounds the fruit off, wood apple makes it strange, and juniper comes up cold and resinous under all of it. It stops and listens, as if the whole world were curled up inside its gently trembling quills. A lonely and tender way of surviving.

Nook Hill is a Shanghai house, founded through the shared perspectives of photography, art history and design. An art laboratory of olfactory, landscape and emotion, taking untamed nature apart with a rational, methodical mindset and breaking away from traditional fragrance structures. For materials it works with century-old names including Robertet and Mane. The name points at hidden hills, and the work goes after the private emotional folds of modern life.

The 10mL arrives as an object as much as a liquid. A small stone opened up and worn on the body, its core magnetic and replaceable. The room diffusers borrow the weight and raw honesty of Brutalist architecture, a curved metal holder and sculptural silver wings. The work is made for anyone who wants the wilderness inside the steel forest of the city, and it treats fragrance, image, text and action as parts of one experiment.