Footnote is a journal for artistic exchange, built around a simple proposition: in each issue, a single central text becomes the starting point for a collective response. Writers, artists, and photographers are invited to engage with that text freely, through essays, images, interviews, and visual experiments — allowing a shared point of departure to unfold across disciplines and perspectives.

For its second issue, the central text is The Merchant of Colours, an original fable written for Footnote by Ben Okri, winner of the Booker Prize. In the story, Okri imagines a world drained of colour, transformed by a wandering merchant who restores colour to people, landscapes, animals, and art itself. The fable becomes both metaphor and provocation: what is colour, how do we perceive it, and why does it exert such emotional force?
Responding to Okri’s text, contributors explore colour as perception, instinct, memory, and construction. In an interview, vision scientist Professor Anya Hurlbert describes colour as an inherently human phenomenon, not simply observed, but created by the brain. Andrew Berardini reflects on art’s capacity to renew perception, while Luke Evans uses darkroom techniques to re-infuse the landscapes of north Wales with heightened, imagined colour. Maximilian Virgili offers a saturated, diffused photographic study of Berlin Zoo, and Danish painter Eva Helena Pade discusses her intuitive, dream-led process, in which colour precedes form and meaning. Additional contributions come from Mattia Balsamini, RZ Baschir, Leon Chew, Nishant Choksi, Louis Mason, Max Miechowski, Nadia de Vries, and Paul Rousteau, forming a layered, collective meditation on colour across text and image.