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THE IMAGINARY INSTITUTE OF SYNESTHESIA

@arpastudios

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Arpa Studios is a perfume brand, a music label and an art collective, working with design and architecture.

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Every element produced becomes part of an archive - a modular structure, like all Arpa objects, designed to be kept rather than left behind. by @arpastudios

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Shaped by @jochen.holz, Arpa’s bottle proportions follow the hand’s movement, sculptural as much as functional. The dropper isn’t just part of the bottle’s design - it’s an invitation to a personal gesture, the one you take the time for a suspended moment. by @arpastudios

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A language of color developed through scent, as an approach to composition - where color becomes grammar and formulation, carrying as much importance as the fragrance itself. by @arpastudios

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The essence of time - a perfume fades, but it never truly disappears.

Barnabé develops perfume formulas as an act of precision - building the architecture of the invisible, searching for the decisive instant that escapes us, framing the echos of time.

Soap, the frame of the scent, captures a geological time and reflects the raw texture of nature, the ingredients of our perfume.

Kapsel, with hinoki wood, an ancient and resistant material building the millennial temples. Japanese cypress, prized for centuries for its scent - each ring of its wood marks a year lived by the organism; the ring becomes the physical, visible, tactile measure of time.

The roots of the hinoki tree connect to the iris roots, the main ingredient of the perfume. Iris, the rarest raw materials in the fragrance industry, is extracted from the plant’s rhizome, slowly dried and reduced to powder before being processed to yield its olfactory material, revealing its powdery, floral scent. Kapsel is not minimal, it is radical. Radical, from the term « radici, » meaning roots: the seed that bursts open and lets the flower emerge.

« From the knots of the wood you can see from which side the tree soared in the sky, which side of it absorbed the southern light, whether it was born in a crowded forest, in a meadow or on the edge of the forest, » wrote Giuseppe Penone in 1970. by @arpastudios

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3 months ago

Barnabé Fillion (1981, Paris), the founder of Arpa, lives and works between Paris, Venice, and Kyoto. A French perfumer whose path to the world of scent is unconventional, rooted initially in photography and medicinal botany. Growing up in Paris, he developed visual art practices, sensitive to its tactile world, which later informed his synesthetic approach to fragrance.

This background allows him to treat scent-making as a narrative process, often inspired by the raw textures of natural ingredients, soundscapes, and geological time. Supported by his singular relationship with @mane_1871_ , for the last 15 years he has had ongoing access to their renowned rare materials.

Barnabé’s practice is often described as botanical and atmospheric: a particular affinity for woods, spices, and resins, used to create fragrances that feel grounded yet transportive, elevating the senses and the concept of perfumery. He integrates organic materials (soil, wood, plants) with industrial elements, breaking down the artificial divide between manufactured culture and raw nature. With Arpa, he takes this same technique elsewhere, revealing a different direction.

With a raw elegance in his work, he avoids any synthetic, loud top notes in favor of deep, earthy complexity. His approach is multidisciplinary, often starting with a specific image, a certain light, a texture of a memory… which he then translates as the intersection of nature and culture: representing a profound inspiration, moving from viewing the environment as a passive subject to an active interconnected matter. Physical landscapes become materials in themselves. Barnabé continues this tradition by letting nature gradually reveal itself.

With Arpa, Barnabé has built a creative studio, extending his practice into the intersection of scent, music, and visual art, in an architectural space developed with the work of his friend, the architect @federicomasotto_architecte by @arpastudios

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3 months ago

ARPA STUDIOS - PARIS

A new laboratory in Paris, completing Arpa’s constellation of creative spaces.

The space is built as an instrument: matter enters, essence exits. Nothing ornamental, nothing incidental - as every surface, every volume calibrated to Barnabé’s work.

At the center of this process stands Arpa’s unique bottle: a hand-blown colored glass bottle designed by @jochen.holz

Architecture : @federicomasotto_architecte by @arpastudios

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3 months ago

Arpa’s presentation of its perfume collection at @olfactorysignals, @10corsocomo by @arpastudios

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3 months ago

Arpa’s presentation of its perfume collection at @olfactorysignals, @10corsocomo by @arpastudios

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3 months ago

Arpa’s presentation of its perfume collection at @olfactorysignals, @10corsocomo by @arpastudios

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3 months ago

Iris Mutanti Officinalis presents the encounter between my research on the iris and a set of residual images drawn from the perfumer’s journal.

These images find their origin in the Japanese notion of makyō: the first visions that appear when we close our eyes within a space of contemplation. They are transcribed here through a photographic process that fixes a portion of these shifting images.

This visual research is brought into dialogue with the olfactory transformation of the iris. In perfumery, iris is extracted from the plant’s rhizome: slowly dried and reduced to powder before being processed to yield its olfactory material.

This transformation is of interest because the scent of the iris is not extracted from the visible flower, but from a buried matter: invisible, subterranean, and horizontal.

L’Almanach Biennale - Consortium Museum, Dijon 03.07.2026 to 31.03.2027

Special thanks to @consortiummuseum @arpastudios @bureau_411 by @arpastudios

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3 months ago

After 15 years of making perfumes I developed Arpa: a multidisciplinary project.

Iris Mutanti Officinalis is a body of work produced with my team at Arpa Studios: a series of photographs and videos devoted to the mutant flower, poised at the threshold between botanical apparition, fiction, and perceptual memory.

The work seeks to bring into relation the invisible matter of perfume, the residual images stirred by our senses, and the possible dream of flowers.

A question runs through the entire project: do flowers dream, and do they share their dreams with one another? And what if these dreams constituted the reality of our own world? Do they, then, dream of our reality?

L’Almanach Biennale - Consortium Museum, Dijon 03.07.2026 to 31.03.2027

Sound : Low Jack @hallaisdelaboue
Special thanks to @consortiummuseum @arpastudios @bureau_411 by @arpastudios

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3 months ago

It has been such a magical time collaborating with the Consortium Museum, who invited me to show a new project for their biennial L’Almanach. For 50 years, the Consortium has never stopped curating shows with my most admired artists.

In this group show I introduce a new series of photographs, a film, sculptures, and scent.

This work is an ongoing research into the creation of a new hybrid iris species: Iris Mutanti Officinalis, which sits at the crossroads of my path between perfumery, botany, and visual arts and design.

L’Almanach Biennale - Consortium Museum, Dijon 03.07.2026 to 31.03.2027

Special thanks to @consortiummuseum @arpastudios @bureau_411 by @arpastudios

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3 months ago