There is a gravitational center at 8/12 St. Agnes. It cannot be named. Everything that passes near it—a compliance report, a credible witness, an upstanding citizen, a mother, a parish priest, a memory—is bent by the field it produces.
I · The universe
8/12 St. Agnes is a transmedia horror universe. The center is a repository that failed.
Everyone who was near it was heading elsewhere. They were at different distances from the center.
The stories are not about the repository. They are about its deformations.
Room 1217
The first work is a scripted fiction podcast. Season one is eight episodes.
In Room 1217, a bureaucrat performs a compliance review of the St. Agnes Home for Girls, shuttered after four staff members were killed. She has never been there. She works from the file. There's also a criminal investigation. A man indicted. He goes to prison. Both are conducted faithfully. Neither can hold what happened. False accounts are generated. Nothing was covered up. The paperwork is accurate. The file is complete.
The girls of St. Agnes are the only ones who were there. They gave their statements. In full. It's on tape. Intake interviews. Family services assessments. Compliance cross-references. Witness interviews. They never speak to the audience. Every word they say was recorded by someone else, for someone else's purpose. The record holds them partially and on its own terms. What they said is not what the file says.
II · Method
The tapes are written. The file is invented. This is fiction.
The tapes are built the way an ethnomusicologist builds a recording. You learn how the artifact actually gets made, and then you make one. The discipline knows the recording is not the thing. You can do everything correctly and still not have it. The compliance report is constructed the same way.
What gets foregrounded on those tapes, and what the record cannot hold, comes out of Black feminist thought. The listener does not see this operating. They only hear the result.
Horror is the form because of dread. Every other genre has to resolve. A documentary that does not resolve has failed. Dread is the only mechanism where not arriving at a conclusion is the achievement. Archive 81 runs on this. Room 1217 is built on tape that will not resolve. Dread is the only apparatus that holds it for a season without the listener leaving. The apparatus is not new. What goes through it is.
III · Creator
Laura Fielder is an award-winning filmmaker, screenwriter, and ethnomusicologist.
Her formation in New York City hip hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s predates and grounds her academic training, and is the origin of the public humanities inclination that shapes her practices.
She holds a Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology from the CUNY Graduate Center and a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Hunter College. She was a founding board member of the Black TV & Film Collective, where over eight years she built funder relationships, secured grant money for members' films, and helped grow the organization to thirteen hundred members. Before returning to film full time, she was an Attendance Teacher in the New York City public schools.
Selected recognition
IV · Contact
Correspondence regarding partnerships, fiscal sponsorship, or press may be directed to:
Based in New York.