CRC #2

Colour Research Colloquium – Report May 2025

by Sanny Schulte

Our second Colour Research Colloquium (CRC) took place in May 2025 and continued our series of interdisciplinary exchanges under this year’s theme of ‘What Colour Means – What Colours Mean’. Once again, researchers and practitioners from a wide range of fields gathered to present their ongoing projects and research to reflect on the cultural, aesthetic, and material roles of colour across media, cultures, history, and society.

Opening Words from Prof. Dr. Susanne Marschall and Dr. Elena Mucciarelli

Susanne Marschall, chief editor of Colour Turn, opened the colloquium by sharing her current work on overlooked figures in the history of colour research. She introduced The Book of Colour Concepts by Alexandra Loske and Sarah Lowengard, which she recently reviewed for the Colour Turn summer issue. Among the many historical vignettes, Marschall highlighted the story of Carry van Biema, a Jewish scholar and artist described as “born in the wrong phase of history,” who was murdered in Auschwitz and whose contributions to colour research remain largely unregarded. Marschall expressed her hope to invite Alexandra Loske and Sarah Lowengard to a future CRC for deeper discussion. She also drew attention to Hein Heckroth, a refugee artist forced to leave Nazi Germany with his Jewish wife, who went on to shape theatre and cinema in Britain as part of the renowned group “The Archers.” Lastly, Susanne encouraged all participants to consider submitting book reviews to the journal, as it’s a very accessible way of getting published.

Elena Mucciarelli, co-chief editor of Colour Turn, then introduced the upcoming special issue on Colour and Rituals, emphasizing the dimensions of agency and performance of colour in ritual practices. She invited contributions not only on European but also on non-European traditions, noting her own focus on South Asian ritual. Mascha Wieland’s dissertation Entangled with Colour was mentioned as exemplary in its approach to colour as a network of material, textual, and affective relations grounded in New Materialism. Mucciarelli also reminded participants to consider the methodological implications of AI in relation to colour research, stressing the need for careful and reflective use as well as making the audience aware of our updated AI regulations for our journal, which are posted on our website.

Athira Mohan – The Colonial Roots of Indian Visual Culture: A Study of Indian Chromolithographs

Athira Mohan, a researcher in Anglophone children’s literature and colour studies, examined how chromolithography shaped Indian visual culture during the late nineteenth century and ultimately led to the internalization of colonial aesthetics. Her presentation situated chromolithography within a global ‘chromatic turn’, brought about by publications such as Goethe’s Farbenlehre, leading to a popular boom in colour printing techniques and democratized access to images.

Mohan demonstrated how early chromolithographs of Indian deities often bore unmistakably European traits: figures with white complexions, Greco-Roman fabrics, and the style in which they were draped across bodies, as well as backgrounds of non-native flora and fauna, like roses. Even popular god:desses, such as Shiva and Kali, were depicted with paler skin or altered iconographies that distanced them from their tribal or scriptural origins. Raja Ravi Varma’s celebrated chromolithographs exemplified this transformation: while he localized some iconographic details (such as replacing roses with lotus flowers), the racialized complexion lightening remained.

The social consequences of these visual shifts were profound. Chromolithographs circulated widely and granted lower- and middle-class households access to images of deities for the first time, as the previous oil paintings were only accessible to rich households. Chromolithographs quickly penetrated the entire society through calendars, adoration/devotional pictures, or small picture gifts when buying soap, and simultaneously reshaped ideals of race and gender by aligning Indian deities with European aesthetics. Mohan pointed out the resulting “mystified fantasy” that fused utopian and apocalyptic imagery, fixing stereotypes of fair-skinned, draped, idealized figures.

The lively discussion connected Mohan’s work to film history, missionary printing practices, and the globalization of visual culture. Susanne Marschall emphasized Ravi Varma’s lasting influence on Indian cinema, while Elena Mucciarelli raised questions about the role of missionary presses in transmitting biblical and European iconographies. Participants also reflected on the aspirational power of calendar art, especially in Kerala, and its lasting influence on collective perceptions of race, gender, and divinity.

Mehraneh Jandaghi Shahi – Meaning-Making Potential of the Mode of Appearance of Colour in Children’s Picturebooks

Illustrator, educator, and researcher Mehraneh Jandaghi Shahi presented her ongoing project, which bridges practice and theory to explore how colour appears in children’s picturebooks. Drawing on David Katz’s phenomenology of colour, she distinguished between surface colours, volume colours, and film colours, while extending the framework to account for transparency, lustre (cf. Katz Glanzfarben), and even non-perceptual colours arising from imagination or memory.

To examine how these perceptual categories function narratively, Jandaghi Shahi combined Katz’s framework with a social-semiotic model from Painter et al. (2013), analyzing how colours contribute ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions in picturebook storytelling. Her case studies illustrated how subtle shifts in colour appearance can shape lived experiences within narratives: for instance, soft layered colours visualizing a child’s imaginative bond with a grandfather, or transitions from flat to blurry hues evoking a stuttering child’s growing social anxiety.

The discussion emphasized both methodological and cultural dimensions. Marschall asked about her selection criteria and raised the question of how Western visual traditions influence children’s books globally. Jandaghi Shahi acknowledged the importance of considering cultural differences in colour usage, noting her interest in expanding the project to include comparative analyses. Sanny Schulte drew connections to Priscilla Layne’s CRC 1 presentation on tracking single colours in comics, while Elena Mucciarelli encouraged Jandaghi Shahi to reflect on the experiential dimensions of colour’s agency. The exchange showed the potential for future development into a PhD-project.

Anna Wells Piotti Castonguay – Teaching Colour – Teaching Race

Anna Wells Piotti Castonguay from Bates College took us on a pedagogical reflection on how teaching colour terms inevitably raises questions of race. Coming from a working-class community in rural Maine with little access to higher education into the world of languages and cultural studies shaped their understanding of how colour concepts intersect with identity and power. They described their encounter with Sabine Doran’s course The Culture of Yellow as formative, sensitizing them to the politics of colour and the entanglement with race and ultimately leading them to inclusive teaching and language learning. 

Piotti Castonguay went on to outline their upcoming undergraduate course, ‘Beyond the Rainbow: Exploring the Science, Language, Art and Culture of Colour’, which integrates physics, neurobiology, culture, art, and linguistics with social questions. They noted how our words for colours are never neutral or unpolitical as they not only vary across languages — Russian distinguishing two words for blue, or German separating ‘rosa’ and ‘pink’—but carry social and racial connotations as well. And these differences then complicate language teaching as racialized terms, like brown, yellow, white or black do not translate smoothly across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Piotti Castonguay not only used their time to give a brief introduction to their background and work but to also outline their upcoming course and look for feedback and suggestions from the present experts. This strategy worked wonders as the discussion was particularly lively and seemed almost impossible to an end.

At first, the conversation quickly deepened into issues of untranslatability and cultural specificity. Piotti Castonguay mentioned their Summer Issue 2025 Colour Turn article, ‘Was ist Black auf Deutsch’, and Germany’s reluctance to talk about race as a concept. Sanny Schulte suggested that ethnic attachment often functions as a substitute term in Germany, as the term ‘race’ is considered a slur and highlighted the insufficiency of binary racial terms in German, where migrant histories (such as Gastarbeiter identities) complicate whiteness. Wells emphasized the pedagogical responsibility this creates for teachers: language instructors hold the power to shape how students encounter and use these concepts, yet translation across contexts always risks distortions. Elena Mucciarelli raised the politics of translation, citing R. F. Kuang’s Babel. The Necessity of Violence as a case where colour terms carry colonial and racial weight. Wells pointed out how ‘yellow’, long used derogatorily, has been reclaimed in recent literature such as R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface. Others noted how in American popular culture ‘yellow’ has functioned ambiguously—as the default skin of Lego figures or The Simpsons (meant to be read as ‘white’), while in current contexts it is being re-signified by Asian American communities. Elena Mucciarelli stressed that translation itself is never neutral: to translate a colour term and the translation process itself is a political act, embedding colonial histories and social hierarchies into new contexts. Wells shared some of their classroom strategies, including role-playing exercises where students imagine explaining race and colour categories to an alien, and hence exposing the constructedness of human categories.

Overall, the session illuminated that teaching colour cannot be disentangled from teaching race. It requires awareness of linguistic variation, sensitivity to cultural taboos, and courage to embrace translation as a political process. Piotti Castonguay’s contribution highlighted both the challenges and the transformative potential of making colour a lens through which students learn to question categories of race, identity, and belonging.

Manuel Cojocaru – Monochrome Existentialism – Between the Uncanny and the Sublime

Artist and philosopher Manuel Cojocaru explored how monochrome aesthetics can articulate existential boundary situations, drawing on Karl Jaspers’ philosophy of existence. Cojocaru presented excerpts from his own experimental works—claymation, stop-motion, and photography—designed to evoke what he calls the “dark sublime.” His creative practice, deeply informed by vivid dreams and philosophical reflection, alternates between intuitive making and theoretical framing. Through case studies of Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, and David Lynch’s Eraserhead, he demonstrated how black-and-white cinematography heightens the themes of despair, silence, alienation, and absurdity central to existentialist thought. 

Discussion circled around the tension between intuition and concept, the role of materiality as a surrogate for colour, and the possibilities of expressing existential dread visually. Marschall stressed that black and white remains part of the spectrum of colour, linking his reflections to earlier CRC talks on greying bodies (Devinn Hurley). Schulte noted resonances with animated configurations of otherness, comparing his works to existential animations like Harvie Krumpet. Participants further discussed the legacy of Jaspers, often overshadowed by Heidegger, and Cojocaru’s plans to bring his philosophical and artistic interests together in his postdoctoral project.

Charles Ledlaire: Demystifying Colour – A Colour Grader’s Perspective

Film colour grader Charles Ledlaire concluded the colloquium by reflecting on how colour is discussed across disciplines. In his professional practice as a grader, he encounters filmmakers, physicists, biologists, and artists.  Each have different vocabularies for describing the same phenomenon. To bridge these discourses, Ledlaire advocates a phenomenological approach that traces historical and contemporary ways of talking about colour, helping practitioners and theorists alike to better articulate what they see and feel.

Ledlaire also reminded participants of the technical history of colour grading, from hand-painted films to today’s digital workflows, and stressed the continuing challenge of communicating colour perception across professional and cultural boundaries.

Towards a Tentacular Network

The May 2025 CRC, once again, demonstrated how colour research thrives when approached from multiple directions, this time at the intersections of art, philosophy, history, pedagogy, and practice. From chromolithography and race to picture books, ritual, existential monochrome, and contemporary grading, our conversations kept on circling back to colour as both a deeply relational concept and an experience.

As the Colour Turn team, we thank all participants and invite further collaboration. The next CRC session is planned for fall 2025, continuing to expand our tentacular network across disciplines, borders, and methods.