Project title: Scheherazade’s Choir: The Radical Curation of Creative Processes

Project initiators: Candice Fairchild and Oluwafunmilayo Akinpelu

COLLABORATORS

1. Amrita Bakshi
2. Candice Fairchild
3. Celeste Amparo Pfau
4. Ernest Ohia
5. Funmi OmO Moji
6. George Berry
7. Iquo Dianabasi Obot
8. Nathaniel Trost
9. Rob Kelly
10. Victoria and Flourish Salawu…

MISSION STATEMENT

Scheherazade’s Choir, in the spirit of One Thousand and One Nights, is a collective formed to focus on the ability of creative processes to sustain artists and creators within a community. Like Scheherazade, who told stories to survive, we believe that creativity originates and sustains life, providing nourishment for us all. Our interdisciplinary group of artists has made a mission to document our individual creative processes in an effort to de-sanitize the product-oriented nature of academia, making the spontaneous journey towards creating art the focal point rather than the all too frequently commodified product.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The project focuses on de-sanitizing the creative process in academia by placing an emphasis on the origins and cultivation of creative work rather than focusing solely on the final product. We have asked (x) artists/scholars in the humanities to document their creative processes as they work towards a final product, eschewing the commodified productivity culture that is valued and demanded by academia. By emphasizing process as equally important to the final outcome, this project will focus on how the narrative of our own creative endeavors sustains us. 

To understand the implications of the creative process as narrative and, in turn, narrative as a form of sustenance, we have turned to Scheherazade’s story. Her story grants us the ability to understand narrative as a tool for not only creating life but sustaining it. In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade challenges our notions of what we deem literary by highlighting the capacity of narrative to create and sustain life. Facing her death at the hands of her new husband who is a metaphor for all the things wrong with the world, she prolongs her life by telling him a story each night, stretching one story across several nights like an infinite sound loop until, finally, she bears his children, ensures their survival, and stretches her genealogical connections to the world. Her stories preserved her life and brought new life into the world, enveloping a new generation into her narrative–pushing the boundaries of literature to create a living, breathing, ever-changing text.

This project seeks to work in a similar vein: pushing the bounds of the literary to create a project that forms a collective rooted in process as art, sustaining both its creators and its audience. While we cannot overlook the submissive-woman trope Scheherazade seems to stand for, we are also cognizant of the way she subverts the very meaning of stories by embracing the chaos that comes with it and manifesting the ethos of taking as much care to curate the process of storytelling as one would for the final outcome. We wish our artistic collaborators for this project to be an embodiment of this ethos, hence the name Scheherazade’s Choir.

METHOD

We intend to curb the sanitization process of artistic creation by asking and following up with artists as they document the process of creating a single piece of art (be it aural, visual, material, or theatrical) and also showcasing the art in a manner of nearly unrecognizable displacement so much that involved artists birth into life the imaginative alternatives through which their works can be exhibited. What would it mean for a sound artist to reject the conventions of showcasing associated with sound and hinge on the physicality of their sound? How can archival materials be artistically depicted without the burden of fitting the archival works into historical realities? What would it mean to display a visual work not on the wall or a surface but in a situation that is out of the norm? More than anything, how can all the chaos that comes with rejecting conventional ways of creation and exhibition be radically curated to take the shape of a mockumentary, a listenable song and podcast reel, a joint collaborative series of tracks that are not linearly arranged but feel like a whole movie and separate soundtracks at the same time. In short, beyond creating a room for artists to individually and collaboratively create artistic works, we want to curate the documented creative processes into a literary album.

Although the initiators will, based on their exposure to the artists’ works, discuss all the possible ways each of them can contribute to the album, the artists will ultimately be allowed to choose what they want to create and how they want to do it. They will be provided materials and support in every way and given a lengthy timeframe to create their works and they will be advised a lot to think outside the convention as they put together their works and document the process every step of the way. At the end of the allotted timeframe, the documentation will be radically curated by Candice and Oluwafunmilayo, a curation that will culminate in showcasing the works in their collaboratively finessed, final drafts.

PROJECT OUTCOME

The literary album is intended to be uploaded to YouTube for online viewing and put up on Spotify and other streaming platforms. The hope is that the visual and auditory experiences of the film will stand alone but also complement themselves. Depending on the opinions of collaborators and their willingness to push the boundaries of the project, there could be a small physical exhibition of the produced works at a chosen location, either here in Alabama or in London where three of the collaborators reside. Since a majority of the works are digital and shipping is a possibility, organizing a physical exhibition is a very considerable option. The ‘album’ will also be submitted to film festivals.

AIM AND OBJECTIVES

One of the goals of the project is to experiment with sustaining chaos in the process of creating any type of artwork and elevating the performative elements of all forms of art while deconstructing the academic and institutional conditions around which art is constructed in this generation. Although we are hardly fixed on what the outcome of the project should actually look like, we hope that the final curated album and the produced artworks themselves will morph into a story and this story will spark liberatory questions such as these: How does a story go beyond being projects and products to being a form of sustenance? What is in a story if not the chaos it tucks into its neat telling? Like Gumbo, this project intends to integrate an oft-separated two-fold process: the process of creating art and then creating a storied life out of different pieces of art.

Forms of art to be radically curated

• Conversational/archival art
• Creative writing
• Visual art
• Sound art
• Dance and theater art

PORTFOLIO

Because of the multimedia nature of this project and its proposed presentation, it is impossible to fit everything into a web page. Once the submissions are radically curated into a literary album, it will be easier to understand the import of every image and file that has been randomly included here.

Disclaimer: Only a few of the many submissions have been included on this page.