Countless illustrious artists have fallen under the spell of a muse: an incantation that possesses artists to direct their expression through the vehicle of someone otherwise unnameable. They aid, complement, disentangle, inspire, and elucidate artistic processes, and have thus long held a place in the artist's arsenal of praxis.
To some, the muse is a mirror; to others, a compass, perhaps a key, a co-pilot, a lantern, or a seed. Frida is an elderly woman I first saw from the window of a friend's apartment. She has been my muse for the past few months, and I might describe her as a match: a catalyst that has initiated a wider chain of reactions.

Our relationship began with a letter I taped to her door: a humble invitation to have tea together. As our conversations unfolded, she has imparted a lifetime's worth of memories, lessons, and recollections. Frida spoke of people as if I'd known them as long as she had and recounted stories down to the details of what she was wearing. She drew me into her world as a witness, and thus I became another vehicle through which her presence, stories, and idiosyncrasies could be transmitted.

Situated within realms and intersections of the banal, the peculiar, the catastrophic, and the consoling, the details of Frida's life to which I am privy extend beyond one-dimensional portrayal. Her renderings sidestep the paralysis of paintings, portraits, and sculptures; the human experience resists such closure. It cannot be translated through portraits, biographies, or documentaries. Rather, we encounter it through vignettes: short scenes that characterise its actors but do not contextualize the play. My engagement presents these vignettes through continual recontextualizations and interventions in which Frida's stories and essence function as a starting point for wider exchanges that stretch into other lives-the lives of tattoo artists, waitresses, and audition participants who are drawn into her world as agents in re-enacting, embodying, and reshaping her lived experiences into new artistic forms

Frida speaks fondly of Wimpy. Of all the city's cafes, past and present, it is her favourite place to go for tea. She recalls outings to town with her sister or friends that were routinely punctuated or ended with a tea at Wimpy, a fast-food restaurant chain, with the nostalgia one might have for a home they no longer live in.
Her attachment to the establishment is not merely brand loyalty, nor convenience, but is rather a home of memory and sentiment that has built up over time: a repository of personal history, a quilt of memories stitched and joined together with the same thread.
As an act, not of homage nor of replica, but rather of reanimation, I visited 9 Wimpy franchises scattered across the city as a means to extend her gestures of fondness and the continuity of her habitual practices.
This experience is documented in the form of film photographs taken at each franchise and translated into postcard format: a format that acts as a fragment of a memory that bridges the gap between sender and receiver.

Post-production is an artistic practice that entails the use of existing cultural material or products as raw material to be remixed, reconfigured or recontextualised. The merit of post-production lies not in its originality, but rather its potential for relationality: the links it draws and interactions it activates between artists, audiences and society at large.

Casting Frida is an exercise in post-production. Using the notes I had taken during my conversations with Frida, I commissioned a screenwriter to write a short scene involving Frida with no context or prompt beyond what had shared with me. I shared nothing of her mannerisms or demeanour with this screenwriter; what he gleaned from her essence stemmed entirely from the types of stories she told, her behaviour in them or retrospective attitude towards them.

The screenwriter established from my notes that Frida is tickled by concepts of fate, clairvoyance and intuition, and spoke of it on multiple occasions. Consequently, he drafted a scene in which Frida visits a fortune teller for a consultation.

As a means to activate the scene, I advertised open call auditions on acting forums on Facebook, appealing to any actors of any age, race or gender to audition for the role of Frida. The invitation was met with a flurry of emails from eager participants, and thus the audition process began.

A total of 12 people, of varied demographics, auditioned for the role of an So-odd-year-old, thus becoming part of chain of connections to and interactions with Frida in a manner almost akin to broken telephone.

By turning Frida's life into a performative role, a re-enactment that passes through the interpretation of myself, a screenwriter, actors, and eventually an audience, this work activates a chain of exchanges that reinterpret and transmit Frida's essence beyond her physical presence. Each participant becomes part of a living dialogue with Frida's stories, thus emphasising the mediation and refraction of identity that occurs as we are woven into the same social fabric.