SNBA - Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes

Rua Barata Salgueiro 36, 1250-044 Lisboa

12 . 09 . 2024 → 12 . 10 . 2024

monday - friday → 12:00 pm – 07:00 pm

saturday → 02:00 pm – 07:00 pm

Artist

Charlotte Wiig

The word “synesthesia” or “synaesthesia,” has its roots in Greek, where syn means “together” and aesthesis means “sensation.” In other words, a fusion of the senses.

Synesthesia is when your brain involuntarily experiences several senses at the same time, when only one is stimulated. For example that you can taste words, experience that different sounds or letters have their own colours, or hear music but see shapes. With other words, when one sense is experienced through another.

Within medical science, the condition has been known for approx. 300 years, but has been “forgotten” and unexplained until modern times (Cytowic, 2002). The frequency of synesthesia is unknown, but estimates suggest that between 2 and 6 percent of the population experience this condition. The ratio between girls and boys is at least 3:1 (Cytowic & Eagleman, 2009).

Synesthesia occurs more often among Autistics. And artists are also overrepresented. Famous examples include Vincent van Gogh, David Hockney and Billie Eilish. It has been documented that certain hallucinogens such as LSD induce synesthesia temporarily.

In working with this project, Charlotte has collaborated with people who have synesthesia, to gain a better understanding of what it means to experience this condition.

She has a desire to understand and present this feeling to others. Can one, without experiencing synesthesia oneself, present this experience in pictures? Charlotte ́s aim is to make images that activate several senses at once, even for those without synesthesia, by presenting images with a saturated and accelerated impression of colors, light, smell, touch, which merge into an intense visual expression.

It is also a goal to allow the photographs to be experienced as a celebration of the senses; alive, with magic and sensory abundance.