Mélisandre Schofield

Fresh out of my bachelor's degree in visual arts, I set out working with a fictional collective (Lafin). I worked on our website, learning as I went... I wrote, printed, and bound books by the fictional members of this collective, and I wondered where they lived, inside me. Should I take a moment every morning, with my breakfast, to contemplate the image of them eating their breakfasts, having their own thoughts, living their independent lives, on a parallel timeline? Should I write letters to them, along with their responses, to better understand their minds, and our relationships?

I considered the ecosystem I was building as a playground--for myself, and for others--for anyone (a sometimes frightening prospect). I wondered, can we play pretend, the way children do? How might real people enter this collaboration? I offered people I met the opportunity to take on a name of their choosing, and join my fictional community. Some did.

So many potential collaborators--like a city of them, hidden within opaque walls. My fictional collaborators were easier to work with, always available. Almost always. But when I reached them, they slipped outside of the parallel time-line, and into another one, one that I think belongs to fiction--a time-line that allows a full life to spark into being, mature, and extinguish within a moment. They challenged me to think of them in the present tense, rather then through the frame of story.

I'm deeply interested in process. Process is revision, sketches, mapping, erasing, coding, decoding, walking. Projects can be treated as collaborators, as characters, not quite real, but also not entirely fiction. They ask to be imagined as living, perhaps. And maybe this feels impossible. Maybe, instead, I offer to imagine the insides of city walls, smudged with the fingerprints of real life collaborators--and I feel apprehensive, there's the work, the fictional collaborators, the real collaborators, and me, offering a space where each of these is malleable, where the rules of play are being decided, but I’m not sure by whom.