The Achromatic Island

Sofie Thorsen:The Achromatic Island
The Achromatic Island
2013
Leporello


The artist book The Achromatic Island depicts the contemporary landscape on the Danish island of Fuur.
This is a region that features typical problems of a rural area in Denmark, such as depopulation and a dependency on the quality of roads and other infrastructure to serve the local industries and tourism, steering the development of the landscape towards more urban sprawl or plain deterioration.
However, the landscape is viewed through a particular lense that is related to a special set of problems from this peripheral area: until the 1930s, a genetical hereditary strain of black and white colour blindness, achromatopsia, prevailed among the inhabitants of the island, but then disappeared with the gradual opening-up of the isolated area. The colour blindness is accompanied by a hypersensitivity to light and a low visual acuity. The images make a number of attempts at showing the visual reality and the landscape of Fuur as experienced by the achromatopes, as it is described by the affected themselves in the available literature and in interviews.
But the images are of course limited by the basic difficulty of understanding somebody elses perception and the more obvious impossibility of apprehending such a radically different perception of the world. And so the piece becomes a work about a place, but also about seeing, about the language and its limits, and about the limitations and possibilities as an artist for reproducing the images she imagines an achromatic world to look like.

The Achromatic Island er et landskabspanorama med øen Fur som motiv.
Indtil 1940 var der på Fur en lidt højere forekomst af en arvelig form for komplet farveblindhed, achromatopsi, end i resten af verden. Den forsvandt efterhånden som Fur blev mere og mere forbundet med fastlandet. Billederne er fotograferet som disse mennesker måske ville have set nutidens landskab.