Nada Almosa and Leandro Reyes
Synesthesia translates to “perceive together,” for it is when you experience one of your senses through another. While there are pre-determined types of synesthesia, we offer the made up version of photosynesthesia, where we center how we “perceive together” imagined narratives and images found on an idle scroll through a phone camera bank. Forest hares with religious practice, messenger snails, toilet stall revelations, they are all intrinsically tied to momentary photographs turned into imagined landscapes.
photosynesthesia is a mindful act of low art. Jack Halberstam’s “Low Theory” has emboldened us to not take ourselves too seriously, as “being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant.” We create for the sake of joy, but not to fill in a gap in a particular field of knowledge or practice, nor to further what is deemed as meaningful and worthy. Ekphrastic writing is a way of envisaging the mental exercise of the made-up photosynesthesia. A game of association that is intuitive, mindful, and fantastical. Our work is an invitation to encourage others to discover their own innate togethered perceptions of photo and imagined narratives.
Leandro Reyes, the great-grandson of Severino “Lola Basyang” Reyes, brings the craft of tale-telling into a new age, using his training in theater arts to paint performance poetry with elaborative gestures; his art is an assortment of different characters playing poet. Leandro writes to tickle the kid your heart can still manage to beat as, along with pestering the grown-up your mind has thought itself ready for. He is one of the founding members of Collaboratory Ph, an art collective composed of writers, musicians, and performance artists from different collectives who came together to create and experiment. Aside from being a poet, Leandro is a screenwriter mentored by Ricky Lee (under batch 24), has produced two independent digital short films, and is now writing a full-length script.
Nada Almosa is a public programs coordinator at 421. She is an Abu Dhabi-based Palestinian artist, writer, and a graduate of Literature and Creative Writing from New York University Abu Dhabi. Nada dabbles in digital illustration, collage and mixed media, and creative writing. She is a practicing poet who draws inspiration from listening to others’ stories. Having collected experiences over the years in editing, theater, exhibition curation, writing, and art production, she has asserted that a career in the arts will be a joyful and fulfilling one.
This project was developed as part of the 2022 edition of the Virtual Collaborative Program for Emerging Artists, presented by Exit 11 Performing Arts Company. It is presented as part of Exit 11’s exhibition, Peripheries.
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