At Design Miami Paris, Vikram Goyal and Sissel Tolaas Craft a Sensory Menagerie
In the gardens of L’Hôtel de Maisons, the New Delhi artisan and Berlin olfactory artist offer a sculptural meditation on Panchatantra fables animated by scent and storytelling
In Indian culture, animals are revered as divine beings with profound spiritual significance, from the cow embodying fertility and motherhood to the lion symbolizing power and protection. So when The Future Perfect tapped Galerie Creative Mind artisan Vikram Goyal to conjure an installation for the lush gardens surrounding L’Hôtel de Maisons for Design Miami.Paris, the New Delhi talent mined the vast reservoir of his home country’s literary canon to craft a meditative menagerie of symbolic creatures. Goyal specifically referenced the Panchatantra, one of India’s oldest compendiums of moral fables, for guidance. In the stories, “animals are not just characters, but raconteurs of timeless human truths,” he tells Galerie. “They’ve been our philosophers, our storytellers, our moral compass, disguised in fur, feathers, and scales.”
There are no such disguises in The Soul Garden, which will be on view at Design Miami.Paris through October 26. As part of the fair’s Design at Large program, Goyal sculpted five symbolic animals—an elephant, tortoise, tiger, crocodile, and snake—using brass, a material his studio masterfully wields into wondrously ornate furnishings and narrative-driven objects. Taking cues from François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne’s animalia, many of which meander nearby courtesy of Galerie Mitterrand, each of Goyal’s creatures is equipped with compartments housing a miniature painting, a story booklet, and Panchatantra excerpts. Visitors are encouraged to sit on crafted stools to reflect, read, and enjoy the late-autumn light of the Left Bank reflecting off the shimmering sculptures.
That encounter deepens through smell. Goyal collaborated with Berlin-based olfactory artist Sissel Tolaas, who infused The Soul Garden with invisible molecules that activate in response to the air. These nano-scent triggers correspond to each animal’s archetypes and habitat, creating subtle atmospheric cues that draw visitors into a more instinctive and empathetic awareness. “In the spectrum of life, animals are not mere witnesses but sentient companions, bearing wisdom, memory, and the silent language of the divine,” Tolaas tells Galerie. “To scale down to the world of an animal is to expand one’s empathy—seeing through senses we often ignore and understanding life beyond human measure.”
Tolaas conducted field research in India to shape her palette of grasses and environmental materials, ensuring the scents resonate with the ecosystem that inspired the sculptures. Her molecules shift with the weather, air currents, and human presence, forming what she calls “a language older than words—the subtle, sacred communication of the animal soul.” Through this invisible layer, she transforms the installation into a living exchange of breath and matter, where empathy, she explains, means “inhabiting the world as [the animals] inhabit it, and discovering in their eyes the reflection of our own humanity.”
Goyal likens The Soul Garden to an offering, enriched each evening by “fable readings” held in the garden, where visitors gather to hear stories of virtue and folly from the Panchatantra beneath the dusky Paris light. Photographer Ali Monis Naqvi and filmmaker Aradhana Seth will document the installation throughout the fair, extending its spirit beyond closing day. “From this sensory encounter, beyond the memory of what they see, I wish for visitors to take a felt memory—something that resurfaces unexpectedly, perhaps years later, triggered by a scent in an entirely different place,” he says. “Beyond beauty, I hope for a quiet shift in how they register the world: to notice the invisible exchanges, and that we are all one shared story.”
Design Miami.Paris will be on view at L’Hôtel de Maisons (51 Rue de l’Université) until Sunday, October 26.