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Karlsruhe (dpa) - Ironically, in the new building of the Karlsruhe tax office you can get perfume that should smell like freshly printed money.
The concept artist Katharina Hohmann developed the «Aerarium» creation and won an art-in-building competition.
They were inspired by the fact that the F. Wolff und Sohn perfumery was formerly located on the new building site.
The perfume is said to consist of iris, fig leaves, cannabis, white musk and suede, among other things.
Hohmann composed the fragrance with the Zurich perfumer Andreas Wilhelm.
It is bottled in bottles of different colors and shapes that have a kind of mother-of-pearl shimmer.
This is no coincidence either: In the Black Forest not far from Karlsruhe, a special perfume bottle made of greenish forest glass, probably from the early modern era, was found, explained Hohmann.
"The shape of this bottle, to which special, magical powers were ascribed, was the model for the bottles that can now be seen in the showcase at the Karlsruhe tax office."
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The first edition is 600 in number - dedicated to the 600 employees.
The bottles cost 60 euros.
The price is made up of the production costs, there is no added value.
Due to the corona pandemic, the start of sales had to be postponed several times.
You can now order the “Steuerduft” on the website www.aerarium-parfum.de and Hohmann will coordinate a collection date at the tax office.
"It's going pretty well," she said.
She has already received feedback from some customers.
The money from the sale will flow into the production of a new batch of glass bottles filled with fragrance.
"So money is transformed into fragrance again and again in an allegorical way," explained the artist.
"The product does not contribute to the increase in capital."
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The name, "Aerarium", is no coincidence either: According to Hohmann, Aerarium was the name for the ancient Roman treasury.
Derived from the Latin word for bronze: aes.
The first traditional tax office kept the so-called movable national assets in the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum.
The fragrance is a "symbiosis between past, present and future".
Money and fragrance are both "not really tangible, sometimes symbolically reinterpreted, but also volatile", is how Hohmann describes her conception.
"Money like perfume works on the level of relationships, namely the interactions between people."
In the digital era in particular, money appears as an “omnipresent, material absence, fragrance is ethereal, as present as it is intangible”.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210420-99-272186 / 2
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