Footnote was conceived in 2024 as a journal for artistic exchange with the aim of fostering new connections between disciplines and approaches. In each issue, writers, photographers and artists are invited to respond to a central text, their responses forming an original, collective body of work. ¶ “These things are colours,” said the merchant, “and they change worlds.” What is the meaning of colour? Why does it move us, and why are we drawn to one colour over another? What are the colours of our dreams? ¶ These are some of the questions suggested by “The Merchant of Colours,” a fable written by Sir Ben Okri for this, the second issue of Footnote. Okri — who won the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road, and whose latest novel isMadame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted — imagines a monotone world that blossoms into colour with the help of a benevolent merchant, each country choosing its colour from the baskets he carries on his back. “Everywhere he went, people cried out for this mystery,” Okri writes. “And so the merchant gave the colours of nature back to the people of the world, to their houses, their places of worship, their clothes, and to their art.”¶ Here, Okri’s story has inspired a series of meditations on colour, its perception and the instinctive response it evokes. As Professor Anya Hurlbert notes in an interview (p.132), colour is an inherently personal experience.“It’s not something that’s out there, that you just see — it’s a concept that the human brain creates, and which is unique to humans.”¶ It’s an idea explored in a lyrical essay by Andrew Berardini (p.38), which ruminates on the power of art to renew perception and enhance the world around us. Similarly, in response to the line “And then one day he returned to his land and gave it the colours it had never known before,” photographer Luke Evans plays with darkroom techniques to infuse the atmospheric landscapes of north Wales with vivid new colours (p.42).¶ Elsewhere, we meet the Danish painter Eva Helene Pade (p.74), one of the most exciting emerging artists, who already has several solo shows to her name. She describes how she works from a dreamlike impulse, rather than preliminary sketches, allowing colour to coalesce into otherworldly figures — at once joyful and utopian, and sinister and uncanny. And photographer Maximilian Virgili visits Berlin Zoo (p.14) in a saturated, diffused response to the line “in an instant the land quickened with brightness, the animals received their distinctive patterns.”