“Phantasmata Codex: The Lagartization of Symbols”

During various medical consultations, Oliver Sacks documents the stories of his patients’ hallucinations.

In the case of Zelda, a historian with Charles Bonnet syndrome (a disease that causes patients with visual impairment to manifest complex visual hallucinations) she says “it is very difficult to describe. It’s a performance! The curtain rises and artists dance on stage, but there are no people. I see black Hebrew letters dressed in white ballet dresses. They dance to beautiful music, but I don’t know where it comes from. They move the upper parts of the letters as if they were arms and dance on the lower ones very gracefully. They go up to the scene from right to left”.

In the “Phantasmata Codex: The Lagartization of Symbols”, Salvador Herrera describes the awakening of consciousness of the ideograms that form a haiku of Matsuo Bashō. Similar to Zelda’s visions, along a 3-metre scroll, saurians dance and sing, combining the poem with the mystery of the mutation between symbols and lizards in an attempt to evoke the hallucinatory experience brought on by the effects of Salvia Divinorum.