Eli Durst, The Children’s Melody, 2025

There’s a concept in communist China called zhuxuanlu, which refers to a central melody of Chinese life. While some level of independence or deviation is acceptable, everyone should exist within certain morally and politically acceptable parameters, in a kind of productive harmony.

In The Children’s Melody, 2025 Guggenheim Fellow Eli Durst explores the very serious absurdities of collective identity formation, through photographs made in environments including cotillion groups, dance practices, ROTC training, and school performances.

When read together, these images defamiliarize everyday life, questioning the relationship between the individual and the institution, between the margins and the center. In sequence, they lay bare how invisible cultural forces shape us into who we become. To borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, which is itself a reformulation of Sartre: “What is done to me, and what is it I do with what is done to me?”

The hardcover book is bound inside a 560x950mm poster (also available separately, unfolded and signed), which wraps the book in ancient contexts of Christian propriety, with texts by Marcel Schwob and the notorious King Henry VIII.