The Fairytale Recordings

Since 2004, Saâdane Afif had invited artists, writers and other collaborators to write texts inspired by his works. What had begun as an experiment developed into a fundamental principle of his artistic practice: existing works were reimagined through the perspectives of others, while the resulting texts in turn became the starting point for new works. An artwork became a text, the text became a composition, a performance, and ultimately a new object.

In 2019, Afif continued this principle with The Fairytale Recordings. At the centre of the work were eight vases made especially for the project by Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg. Each was associated with one of eight texts from Afif’s repertoire, written by Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ina Blom, Tacita Dean, Mick Peter and Tom Morton for earlier exhibitions. Titles such as Ghost, Vice de Forme and Black Hole referred back to the original artworks. Artist and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers transformed the texts into scores that moved between speech, recitation and song.

During the performance, the eight vases were placed on plinths around a circular stage. Each was closed with a lid topped by a small porcelain figure depicting the opera singer Katharina Schrade in a different pose reminiscent of Baroque oratorio. The title, date and reference number of each recording were inscribed around the rim of the respective lid.

At the beginning of each piece, an assistant removed the lid from one of the vases. Katharina Schrade entered the stage and assumed the pose in which she was depicted as a porcelain figure on the corresponding lid. She then began her sung-spoken recitation, slowly making her way towards the open vessel. She delivered the final verses directly into the vase, after which the assistant replaced the lid and sealed the vessel.

In this way, the singer’s voice was symbolically preserved in porcelain. Breath, sound, language and movement – the inherently ephemeral elements of a performance – were given a lasting vessel. After the performance had ended, the sealed vases remained as works in their own right: sculptures, imaginary sound recordings and containers of a moment that had passed. The title The Fairytale Recordings took this idea literally. The recording was captured not on a conventional medium, but, as if in a fairytale, within the porcelain itself.

Since 2026, the eight vases have been part of the collection of the Lenbachhaus in Munich.