5 Questions with Fayen d'Evie
Fayen d’Evie is an artist and writer, born in Malaysia, raised in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and now living in the bushlands of unceded Jaara country, Australia.
Fayen’s projects are often collaborative, and resist spectatorship by inviting audiences into sensorial readings of artworks. Fayen draws on blindness to propose critical and imaginative ways of navigating uncertainty and the precarious; handling the tangible, intangible, and concealed; and documenting ephemeral encounters through hallucinatory recall.
Fayen has exhibited at renowned locations including the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Gallery of NSW, TarraWarra Biennial, and the State Museum of Vadim Sidur (Moscow), among others. She is a lecturer in the Masters of Communication Design programme of RMIT University, and is the founder of independent imprint 3-ply.
No.1
In the event blurb, ~~~~ “...derelict in uncharted space…” is described as a homage to a Star Trek fan club, who launched the non-profit initiative Project Communicator in 1974 in the hopes of sharing the marvels of the sci-fi series with blind audiences. How did you begin conceptualising the show?
I first read about Project Communicator when I was investigating the history of commercial audio description. Most disability histories offer the starting point for audio description as a master's thesis written in 1973 by a San Francisco journalism student, Gregory Frazier. He developed a creative literary experiment, a screenplay that mangled transcription of the dialogue of a film—The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman—with new lines that were sometimes voiced by new characters to introduce visual details to blind audiences.
But when I unearthed that thesis in a San Francisco library, I discovered that he actually acknowledged another creative project as slightly predating his. This was radio adaptations of Star Trek episodes, an initiative dreamed up by a San Francisco fan club—the Star Trek Archive, later renamed Star Trek Video Archive, or STVA. I was really enamoured by their amateur collective method and how they explicitly aimed for creative and imaginative adaptations, [which was] not the bland, robotic voiced audio description that later became standard. When I learned about that group's pilot project being shut down by Paramount, who threatened to sue them for piracy, I was interested in how they are effectively absent from disability history, and I began to dream of bringing their pilot back to life in another form.
No.2
I’m interested in the large number of artists (musicians, designers, writers and designers—21 in total) involved in this event; it involves people such as Lloyd Mst, Benjamin Hancock, Lorena Zapiain, Anna Seymour, and many more. What does it look like to produce a show with that many artists involved, and what were the motivations behind devising something that involves so many?
It looks like a plethora of Discord messages and WhatsApp alerts throughout the day and night! To be honest, I never intended the collaborative team to grow to that scale. But the possibilities to weave in collaborators kept sparking. My projects are often like that, it's true, but in part it relates to being honest about credit and citation. I think that people often create works that don't acknowledge the many bodies that have touched a project in smaller or larger ways, art structures and systems push for just one or two names to be acknowledged, and I don't think it's either fair or accurate. But beyond my politics of authoring, the kind of work that I'm interested in can usually be more fun, more exciting and more unexpected, and I think creatively richer, when extraordinary people with various skills and ideas come together.
There's a line in the closing scene of the Star Trek episode that we are referencing that goes: ‘the glory of creation is in its infinite diversity’. When I first encountered that line, I thought, oh, this is too over-the-top to use. When I listen to or look at what we've created together in the stage show, the conceptual and the aesthetic outcomes are really moving to me, and I recognise the imprint of every collaborator. And now that line—‘the glory of creation is in its infinite diversity’—has acquired a different kind of meaning for me.
No.3
When you develop a project that involves collaboration and community, especially as a show that foregrounds accessibility, what do you think are some key steps that you and your collaborators take to ensure it is safe and generative?
It's not easy, and there's no blueprint. Sometimes we have to make hard decisions about roles, or we need to change plans if boundaries of safety feel threatened, but I'm able to be guided by a confidence and certain values and principles of access that I follow, especially Carmen Papalia’s notion of access as a temporary, collectively held space, and Mia Mingus’s work on access intimacy. On top of this, [I also think about] our collaborator Nelly Kate’s term: abundant subjectivity.
Generosity is important—including giving people space to be inventive, to feel like they can be liberated, to experiment and learn and be playful. What’s also important is introducing people to one another. One of the things that I've loved in this show is the possibility of introducing people to one another and the magic that might come from those creative encounters.
No.4
There are in-person and digital components for this show, with the former happening this week (11-14 Oct) while the latter is scheduled for next week (18-21 Oct). Can you tell us a little about how they might differ from each other, or if there is an interest to bridge the two in a way that honours accessibility?
The live performance season and the radio season are intimately connected. Every single performance is being recorded: the background sound design, the live sound performance components, and also the shifting cast of audio describers that are part of each show.
So the radio season is a way for audiences who are at a distance in time or space to experience the audio descriptive layer of the show. For me, it's a way of relating back to the honouring of this notion of radio plays in a way that foregrounds the creative possibilities of audio description.
No.5
How do you personally understand disability as language, and how does that language apply to your artistic process, especially with regard to ~~~~ “...derelict in uncharted space…”?
I don't personally understand disability as language, but what I think that disability offers in all its perceptual variation is an openness to forms of languaging that are beyond the norms that we encounter within the structures of society. What this means for me is that involving collaborators who come from abundant perceptual variation within a project creates exciting places for language to flourish in an entity in surreal ways.
A picture of Fayen d’Evie shrouded in blue-tinted darkness. She has her eyes closed and looks to be in a meditative state.
Find out more
In 1974, an amateur Star Trek fan club in San Francisco launched Project Communicator, a non-profit initiative to bring the wonderment of Star Trek to blind audiences, through descriptive radio plays. For their pilot, they chose the episode ‘Is There In Truth No Beauty’, which guest starred a blind telepath character. Despite being endorsed by the Star Trek cast, and narrated by Trek actor James Doohan, Paramount perceived the project as piracy. The pilot was never released, and Project Communicator was abandoned.
In this world premiere season, a stellar collaborative of dancers, artists, writers, musicians, and designers pays homage to the creative innovation and collective ethos of Project Communicator. We invite you to join us for an ambitious movement performance that experiments with possibilities for inter-sensorial translations, beyond the boundaries of perceptual norms, and the boundaries of space-time
The live performance season will be adapted into an audiodescribed radio performance season, to be digitally broadcast between 25–28 October via Digital Fringe. (These dates have been shifted back by a week in deference to the post-referendum Week of Silence.)
Tickets here, or stream directly via accesslab.world.