Velvet Tonka Extrait

WHEN FRAGRANCE BECOMES MATTER

Franco-Moroccan sculptor and designer Samir Mazer conceived Traces, an installation envisioned as a sensitive and visual interpretation of fragrance. Based between Toulouse and Fez, Samir Mazer has spent over thirty years exploring traditional zellige, diverting it from its decorative purpose to reveal its materiality, light, and memory.
Driven by a desire to extend the story of this millennia-old art form, he reconsiders it across multiple scales, from mural frescoes to sculptural works, infusing it with an unprecedented sense of sensoriality. Each fragment of clay becomes a site of movement, a living surface shaped by folds, reliefs, and silences. Freed from pure functionality, zellige emancipates itself and transforms under the artist’s gaze, becoming a medium of dialogue between sacred and contemporary art, geometry and intuition, architecture and vibration.

Presented in the Parisian BDK Parfums boutique, Traces celebrates the symbolic link between Morocco and Paris, between heritage and urban creation, and invites us to experience fragrance differently, through matter and emotion.

A conversation with Samir Mazer:

How did you approach this collaboration with BDK Parfums for the launch of Velvet Tonka Extrait?
Traces revisits the traditional technique of chiseling zellige, a unique craftsmanship that reveals raw clay by removing its glaze, giving rise to subtle textures and reliefs. Originally used for floral decoration and calligraphy, this technique is explored here to create new forms of textuality. The word Traces refers to what remains after an action: the memory of a movement, a contact, or an energy captured within the material. A trail, an irregularity, a scar, but also an emotional and poetic imprint, what remains essential after light, matter, and gesture have entered into dialogue.

What shapes, colors, and materials came to mind when you experienced Velvet Tonka Extrait?
Velvet Tonka Extrait evokes a material under tension, both dense and luminous, traversed by facets and reliefs, like a surface shaped by time, heat, and light. Certain ingredients triggered sculptural sensations within me: pistachio, a muted, patinated green punctuated by flashes of light; tonka bean, with its deep volumes, undulating reliefs, and velvety, almost earthy density that both absorbs and reflects light; orange blossom, a soothing dimension translated into calmer, more diffuse visual zones; and leather, a sense of formal restraint expressed through darker tones and contained tension.
Together, these elements form a sensitive topography, where each ingredient becomes a variation of material, light, and rhythm — a trace.

Where do the materials you used come from?
My universe is directly connected to the earth and its many textures. Zellige, an ancestral material, lies at the heart of my practice. Made from natural clays, it is shaped and transformed by fire, gesture, and time. It is a noble material, fundamental to Moroccan civilization. Within this collaboration, the dialogue with the materials of the BDK Parfums boutique emerged naturally. Burgundy stone and zellige share an essential quality: they carry geological memory, a silent density, and reveal their beauty through nuance, patina, and imperfection. Their relationship is one of complementarity. Stone absorbs light, anchors it in space; zellige, in contrast, captures and reflects it.
I also chose to introduce brass inserts, appearing like points of light emerging from the material. This choice echoes the BDK Parfums flacon, the golden cap of la Collection Matières, and the subtly gilded hue of the new extrait. These metallic accents visually extend the world of Velvet Tonka Extrait.
This dialogue between stone, zellige, and brass mirrors the one between the perfumer’s work and my own. Where the perfumer shapes an invisible material — scent — I shape a tangible one — earth. In both cases, raw matter is transformed through gesture and sensitivity to give rise to emotion.