Footnote #2

Footnote is a new journal for artistic exchange. Each issue, they invite writers, photographers and artists from around the world to respond to a word, phrase or idea in a central text, fostering new connections between disciplines and approaches.

For its second issue, the central text is The Merchant of Colours, an original fable written for Footnote by Ben Okri, winner of the Booker Prize. Okri imagines a world drained of colour, transformed by a wandering merchant who restores colour to people, landscapes, animals, and art itself. The fable becomes both metaphor and provocation: what is colour, how do we perceive it, and why does it exert such emotional force?

Responding to Okri’s text, contributors explore colour as perception, instinct, memory, and construction. Vision scientist Professor Anya Hurlbert describes colour as an inherently human phenomenon, Andrew Berardini reflects on art’s capacity to renew perception, Luke Evans uses darkroom techniques to re-infuse the landscapes of north Wales with heightened, imagined colour. Maximilian Virgili offers a saturated, diffused photographic study of Berlin Zoo, and Danish painter Eva Helena Pade discusses her intuitive, dream-led process, in which colour precedes form and meaning.

Additional contributions come from Mattia Balsamini, RZ Baschir, Leon Chew, Nishant Choksi, Louis Mason, Max Miechowski, Nadia de Vries, and Paul Rousteau, forming a layered, collective meditation on colour across text and image.