Synesthesia

Synesthesia was born from my desire to visually translate the movements of thought into photography. In order to bring this project to life, I went to meet synesthetes whose sense of smell is linked to the sense of sight.

Our conversations allowed me to build a collection of images inspired by the abstract and poetic forms that they described to me after smelling an odor. For example, for some of them, the smell of a banana was represented visually by the appearance of “green, round shapes with small red spots” while for others, it was “a large blue triangular shape with brown outlines”.

To create this photographic series, I made an ingenious device that worked like a scanner, accompanied by a bank of shapes and colors. With this device, I was able to recreate the synesthetic visions of each participant. Through this process, the image then becomes the direct extension of the inner perception of synesthetes.

Today, my project brings together a collection of experimental scans (each print is unique) creating a new link between the visual and the olfactory.

— Exhibited at “Fototechnika”, Pasquart Museum, Biel, 2023