The question that opens this text guides a research project that brings together two fields on the margins of social studies of knowledge, materiality, and technology: olfactory studies and textile studies. At this intersection, we seek to ethnographically explore a minor gesture: smelling the clothes of someone who is no longer present in an everyday, domestic context. In this exploration, we are confronted with thinking of writing, rather than as a means of describing what is perceived, as a way of being present; something that accompanies the gesture, that accounts for what happens when we smell, what is evoked and fabulated, something that also shapes the encounter itself. (read more...)