Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020
Arteles Creative Center's residency artists and their projects 2023-2020
Arteles Creative Center's residency artists and their projects 2023-2020
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Write & Create program / NOVEMBER 2022<br />
Naakai Addy<br />
USA<br />
www.daughterofnai.com<br />
About<br />
Naakai Addy is a Ghanaian-American writer with a<br />
background in performing arts and a creative interest in<br />
photography and digital collage. After spending her childhood<br />
in Southern California, Naakai has since lived, studied, and<br />
worked throughout the United States and in Mexico, Norway,<br />
Ireland, Spain, and Scotland. She studied Linguistics at the<br />
University of St. Andrews, Spanish language and literature at<br />
Wesleyan University, and Creative Writing at Trinity College,<br />
Dublin, where she earned an M.Phil with Distinction.<br />
Naakai worked as a copywriter, essayist, and features writer<br />
for over a decade, and is currently finalizing her first fulllength<br />
novel. Her nonfiction short story 3-Step Face Mask<br />
was published in the Sycamore Review in 2021. Naakai<br />
began ballet training at the age of 3 and has since studied<br />
contemporary, tap, jazz, lyrical, modern, ballroom, and<br />
bellydance. As a singer, she has performed choral music,<br />
opera, and musical theater.<br />
Come Home<br />
I came to <strong>Arteles</strong> to work on a multimedia project about<br />
reclaiming an inherent sense of value, belonging, and home<br />
in an othered body. For many years ‘home’ felt too elusive<br />
a concept to dive into with any consistency, so I avoided it.<br />
For the first two weeks at <strong>Arteles</strong>, I was pulled away from my<br />
intended project by a different one I needed to edit. While<br />
focused on that, I began to actually feel at home. Maybe it<br />
was that there was no pressure for this to be a home, nor<br />
for this time, space, and group to be anything but whatever<br />
they unfolded to be. I was just…here…and there was nothing<br />
I had to ‘do’ to earn the belonging I craved, nor did anyone<br />
need to grant it. After I finished the tasks occupying the first<br />
two weeks, I took a few days to unravel, rest, panic a little,<br />
breathe a lot. Then, Come Home came back to me. I’ve been<br />
making and editing this digital collage project in Canva and<br />
Pixlr, using a combination of original photography and video,<br />
stock elements, music, and lyrical prose. These stills are the<br />
title card and the first page of a chapter called ‘Texas’.<br />
Under the name ‘daughter of nai,’ Naakai works with lyrical<br />
prose, digital collage, movement, and music to explore<br />
themes of otherness/non-belonging, blackness, womanhood,<br />
non-Western concepts of beauty, and disability. daughter of<br />
nai pays homage to Ga spirituality and centers the sacred<br />
feminine archetypes of the siren, huntress, healer, and queen.