Screening: Mariah Garnett: Songbook

Songbook is a 55-minute experimental film by internationally recognized artist and filmmaker Mariah Garnett, screening as part of her exhibition The Pow’r of Life is Love at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Santa Fe.

Developed over several years, the film is rooted in Garnett’s engagement with the archive of her great-great-aunt, Ruth Lynda Deyo—a composer and spiritualist who lived in Egypt from 1924 to 1960. While in Luxor, Deyo transcribed spirit communications and began composing a grand opera about Akhenaten and Tutankhamun. The work was never finished or performed, and its imagined world remained sealed within private notebooks.

Rather than attempting a reconstruction, Songbook confronts and reworks the colonial frameworks embedded in Deyo’s project. Garnett responds not with fidelity but with rupture—bringing in new collaborators, new geographies, and new epistemologies. The film weaves together Garnett’s 2021 research footage from Cairo, excerpts from Deyo’s texts, and new performative sequences shaped by opera singers Breanna Sinclairé and Christopher Paul Craig, musician Holland Andrews, and playwright Raphaël Khouri.

Together, they animate and interrupt the archive—reclaiming the operatic form as a site of porous authorship, spiritual ambiguity, and political inheritance. Songbook moves fluidly between video essay, documentary, and staged performance to meditate on what it means to inherit not just material, but mythologies—what to keep, what to break, and what to make possible in the aftermath.