A R C H I V E2 0 0 0  
.18
  Phyllis Baldino
Color Without Color
  USA 1999
videotape – 18:50 min
 
There is nothing more familiar to us than colour, and at the same time nothing more elusive. People have occupied themselves with this complex phenomenon through the ages, yet facts about colour in the world are scarce. Colours without objects (bearers) do not exist, but the nature of objects without colour is visible only if there is someone who does not habitually perceive the world as a place full of colour. Not everybody sees in colour. Some people have problems with certain colours; others see no colours at all. For this last group, the achromatics, the world is colourless, and they see it in black and white, or rather as a multiplicity of grey tones. Baldino's own fascination for the phenomenon of colour stimulates her to seek further information from the achromatics. Some of them have never seen colours and have to find other ways of imagining it. Baldino starts out from her own experience: in images without colour compiled from recordings of the surroundings in which the interviews were made she tells a story about colour. The many grey tones are produced by filtering a particular colour out of the image, thereby translating colour into non-colour. The range of grey tones that is produced in this way is qualitatively different from the mere absence of colour, and the story of the great absent colour is narrated in several varieties of grey, thereby making its presence and absence very much felt. For people with colour vision the images evoke associations with the black and white images of early photography, film and television. Yet Baldino is less concerned with the absence of colour than she is with the traces left by colour, which remain visible in the image, despite their absence. Thus she makes her own achromatic translation of the world, although it is not the kind of translation that the colour-sighted may translate back without further ado. In it she renders visible something of this everyday, yet so complex phenomenon.

– Carla Hoekendijk
Editing, special effects: David Chmura
Sound: Paul Hill
With: Zoe Anthony, Jennifer Duffy, Sarah Edmiston, Frances Futterman, Rich Hennessy, John Masi, Robb Murray, Dave Weber, Dana Zarett, Rebecca Zarett
Song: Rebecca Zarett

Phyllis Baldino, 1956, New Haven (USA)
Lives and works in New York

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