An exploration of the synesthetic phenomenon, where language and perception interweave in poetical ways.
Synästhetische Bilder consists of two video works by Annette Le Fort showing the artist's mother Eilith Le Fort, who as a synaesthete is able to experience colours corresponding to each of the vowels.
The first video captures the synaesthete at her desk as she speaks to herself, provoking and describing the colours while trying to paint them. By doing so she creates an audio-visual meditation on the intermingling of the senses. The second video is for closed eyes, with a black screen, whose image emerges within the listener's mind, following her voice as she journeys through different scenes, describing the inner colours she sees and which are created purely through language. Both video works explore synaesthesia as a phenomenon with a subjective order, where language and perception interweave in poetical ways.
Annette le Fort is an artist and typographer, researching in the field of language, with a focus on the relation between speech and writing, the act of writing, script as a trace of memory, palimpsest and synaesthesia. She explores this mainly through video work, sound projects, photograms and different forms of performative diaries. Handwriting I – IV / Mothers Diaries (2015), Handwritings V / Sevilla Diaries (2015) and Handwritings VI – XIII / Memory Maps (2019) were published by Revolver Publishing Berlin. She is also the editor of a series of magazines revolving around the "materiality" of language, which are based on her project at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Parole #1: The Body of the Voice / Stimmkörper, Parole #2: Phonetic Skin / Phonetische Haut and Parole #3: The Hand Writing / Handschrift were published by Salon Verlag, 2009, 2012 and 2017. Since 2009 she is Professor for Book Design at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel, Germany.
