Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

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