A continuous guided walk for one group tracing a molecular trail between two rooftops and two temporalities: Christian Jankowski’s Roof Walk (2007) and Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece (1971).
1. Canal Street, near the intersection with Broadway
(The group gathers among perfume vendors and counterfeit goods.)
Welcome to Canal Street – the city’s lungs of imitation, where labels reproduce faster than meaning. This is where our molecules begin. Between the stalls, perfumes are endless recompositions – Dior turned into Dear, Chanel as Channel, Burberry as Berry – small acts of desire disguised as commerce.
“New York is an empire of scents,” wrote Chandler Burr. “You turn a corner and are enveloped out of nowhere in an olfactory hologram – warm steamed rice, sour milk, overheated cedar mulch with a sweaty genitals angle… but you cannot find them if you look for them. They find you.”
Let them find us.
Take a breath.
Don’t seek the smell – let it arrive.
Desire never moves in a straight line; it circulates, recomposes, lingers in the air.
Today we walk inside Burr’s “olfactory hologram,”
a corridor of invisible architectures.
Benjamin once wrote of a “non-sensuous similarity” – a kinship that operates beneath sight or sound, where correspondences reveal themselves through resonance rather than resemblance. This walk moves within that field. Between Jankowski’s and Brown’s rooftops,
similarities unfold not through what we see but through what touches us invisibly: air pressure, molecular drift, scent, memory. The choreography exists in the echo between gestures – a mimetic relation carried by the city’s atmosphere. To sense it is not to perceive a likeness but to inhabit an affinity, a shared rhythm of disappearance and attraction.
Kristupas Sabolius describes such moments as training for synesthetic thinking – when time, memory, and perception begin to behave like holograms. A single fragment can hold multiple durations at once; the senses blend, and imagination thickens the air around us. The holographic, he writes, “is not the illusion of volume, but the presence of invisible depth.”
Smell, as Rachel Syme notes, “can feel a little like talking about dreams – often tedious, rarely satisfying”; its dramas rarely announce themselves, and yet they bind us. Desire behaves the same way – elusive, recurring, untranslatable. “Much of the pleasure of nasal perception is untranslatable,” she reminds us, and perhaps that is its spell: to make us long for what can only be sensed, not named.
(Walk begins westward through the perfume shops – slow tempo.)
Each breath is a rehearsal. Each scent, a choreography of molecules that do not return the same way.
2. Perfume shop on Canal Street
(Inside or beside a stall; vendors’ chatter in the background.)
We enter a laboratory of fakes, though nothing here is truly false. Molecules don’t counterfeit; they seduce.
Smell something at random – the first bottle that catches your eye. That’s our first dancer.
Every imitation here holds fragments of the original, like a hologram: cut one piece and you’ll still find the whole inside.
The trail between Jankowski and Brown begins here – between reproduction and improvisation, between the copy and the body that moves, between the known and the wanted.
(Pause for participants to smell or observe.)
3. 93 Mercer Street
(former Helmut Lang perfume shop)
(Walking north toward SoHo, pausing outside the building.)
Before it became a clothing store, this was Helmut Lang’s perfume shop – an architectural bottle made of quiet and powder.
Lang’s scents were built like garments turned inside out: abstraction as intimacy.
A ghost of that era still lingers – musk, stone, dust, metal.
Here, fashion became vapor.
A bottle became a body.
Perfume as disappearance, or the trace of touch left behind.
“We dance like molecules,” Malašauskas notes, spinning a hula hoop, an act of compulsive improvisation.
You can imagine the hoop tracing an orbit between rooftops, between decades, between breath and skin.
(The walk continues westward toward Wooster Street.)
4. Corner of Grand and Wooster Streets
(Participants pause mid-walk, noticing air currents, café smells, exhaust, skin.)
Between Canal and SoHo, the air changes texture – warm pastry, cold steel, detergent, dust, perfume on passing strangers.
The nose keeps time better than any clock.
This is where interference happens: molecules colliding, cancelling, merging.
Each scent interrupts another – like overlapping choreographies from different centuries, or the way one desire brushes another aside.
The trail we leave behind is not a line but a cloud – a dispersed archive of bodies passing through air.
(Brief pause – listening to ambient sounds.)
5. 93 Wooster Street
(Arrival point; Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece site
visible nearby.)
We end where Trisha Brown began: SoHo’s skyline, 1971.
Brown placed dancers on rooftops, each one relaying
a movement to the next –
a choreography transmitted through distance, like
a rumor,
like scent, like longing traveling through the city.
Decades later, Christian Jankowski climbed another rooftop –
a remake, a reflection,
a new wave of air disturbed by a camera instead of
a dancer.
Between them stretches the space we’ve just crossed –
half street, half hologram –
the interference pattern of performance, memory,
and desire.
Look up:
Every rooftop still holds a trace of those gestures,
invisible but persistent.
They hover like fragrance molecules – still dancing,
still recomposing,
never back.
(Pause, silence, collective breath.)
Coda – optional reading
“Each molecule carries traces of everything else – forming an atmospheric montage where past and present, performance and residue,
fold into one another.”
We are all holograms in motion –
each breath, a reconstruction of what was,
what could be,
and what lingers between –
the city’s invisible pulse,
its scent of unfinished gestures,
its quiet choreography of desire.a
