Cinderella's Diaries, with Sina Seifee & Bryana Fritz rile* books

Welcome to this episode of our rile* books podcast series, featuring Cinderella's Diaries, a project by Brussels based artist and researcher Sina Seifee, with readings by Bryana Fritz. Over the last few years Sina has been working on fairy tales, zoologies and the participation of animals in texts. More recently Sina started to work with the figure of Cinderella, thinking with her about the human-animal modes of imagination.

From this Sina started to develop a series of texts called Cinderella's Diaries. In this podcast Sina will introduce us to this research and writing practice. Born in Iran, Sina looks at the changes the Farsi dubbed version brought to Cinderella's character. Further Sina looks at Cinderella's position, living in an impossible house, locked in an attic surrounded by animals as her companions. The second half of the episode features readings from the first two diaries, read by dancer, performance-maker and text-worker Bryana Fritz.

Edited by Sven Dehens.

[ Transcript ]

Introduction by Sina Seifee:

"Hello, welcome rile* books podcast, my name is Sina Seifee, I am artist and researcher based in Brussels. Over the last few years I have been working on fairy tales, zoologies and the participation of animals in texts. I have been working with the figure of Cinderella for some time, thinking with her about the human animal modes of imagination.

"Cinderella is part of my imaginary and my heritage, especially the Walt Disney version of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which was dubbed masterfully before the Iranian revolution. Cinderella’s voice in Farsi, which was the continuum of an actor-training that originated in Tehrani cabaret voice-performances, has a completely different tonality than its English original. Her articulation sounds much more adult and sexy while the mice speak more “childish.” From a different archetype of a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt, she is now part of the older regimes of moral narratives, almost abject with no pedagogical significance unless she is totally refashioned. Disney didn’t change the story so much but made the choice to make the animals the real protagonist of the story. It is hard to imagine that anyone would want to raise their children (regardless of gender) to be like Cinderella, weak.

"From whom should we inherit our practices and how? I prefer Cinderella to be my ancestor. Cinderella is not liberated, but she is also not not-free. She lives in an impossible house with an impossibly terrible family. Why doesn't she become a psycho? Why doesn't she become estranged? Cinderella is circumscribed in all sorts of ways, yet she exercises a radical form of freedom that allows her to know more about the animals she lives with. Our imagination, as the audience of the story, depends on her animals. Cinderella incorporates a form of trans-humanity that lies in the way she is inhabiting and composing with a place that she cannot escape. Can we think of Cinderella as an amateur ethologist? Amateur, meaning the one who develops an expertise in taste. And ethologist, meaning a practical mode of attention to animals, for whom the ways that attention is addressed matters. From Cinderella one can learn cross-species politeness and exploring ways of learning what animals are capable of doing with and because of her labour. With her we can make a move from emancipatory critical analysis to pragmatism. Learning pragmatism from Cinderella is about how to think and act with her evil sisters (biological or adopted).

"In writing Cinderella’s diaries I was interested in getting to know more about how the story changes when the investigator becomes a biographer. And try to think in the rhythms of daily living in Cinderella’s mansion, including the receiving of insult upon insult, pleasure of mending spiderwebs, cutting cat bullshit, feeding illegal mice, and routines of schizo-affective hallucinating with talking animals. I was also thinking about contemporary Eur