representation ‘help’ in the repertory of sensitivity to and experience of artistic emotion? The visually impaired some-times have a language that is surprising, or indeed baffling to the sighted, when they evoke colours, sensations that are unfamiliar to the sighted who are ulti-mately deprived of one or several senses. Instead of emphasising deprivation, these partially sighted people imply a positive dimension of their perception of the world. ‘Colours are fundamental. There are vibrations, equivalencies, in such a way that we have a colourful inner space and a desire to share it’. Claude Garrandes (Nicole Abecassis, Garrandès, l’éclaireur, 2014).

The idea for this art project emerged from hearing the sensitive discussions of the partially sighted.

The idea for this art project emerged from hearing the sensitive discussions of the partially sighted.

How do the visually impaired perceive their environment?

Colours are essential to the blind. The blind do not live in the dark. Darkness and silence are perceptions of sighted and hearing people respectively. It appears that the blind hear voices in colour, and associate them with people. They can access people’s faces through the col-ours that they inspire. However, colours change just like moods… The visually impaired develop mental representations

of images and colours. The name of each colour has its own potential.

‘Green is beautiful. Because each time I love something, I am told that it’s green. I love wearing green’. (Sophie Calle, Aveugles, 2011). 

Sophie Calle was the first artist to enter the world of the visually impaired. In 2011, she published Aveugles, where she talks to people who have been blind since birth about their perception of beauty and colours. She therefore began to think about the absence, lack of and compen-sation of a sense, the notion of visible and invisible.

Jacques Lusseyran, in his autobiograph-ical work Et la lumière fut, demonstrates this phenomenon unique to the world of the visually impaired: ‘Light made its colours on things and on beings too. My father, my mother or people I encoun-tered or bumped into in the street, all had a colourful presence that I had never perceived before becoming blind’.