5. Shawn Thiel

Location: Tucson, Arizona, USA

My older brother - three years and twenty days ahead of me. My first memory of him is tender: he handed me his tiny hamster, nestled in its cage, confessing he was unfit to care for it. He placed it gently on the kitchen table where I sat with our mother, tears in his eyes, asking us to care for it in the way he imagined he could not. It struck me even then as strange, because to me, my brother was always a gentle and protective soul - something of a superhero.

The next memories are clouded with fear - threads of admiration to physical pain. Shawn has wrestled with his mental health for as long as I can remember, and that battle has rippled through our family like a child’s mobile dangling above their crib; endlessly shifting, forever trying to rebalance after each disturbance. I have always been hesitant to share his story, out of instinctive protectiveness, out of conditioning not to “share family business,” and out of a quiet shame that I’ve since shed. I’m grateful that society has begun to shift its perspective - that we can now speak openly about the importance of tending to our minds as we do our bodies.

When I began this project, Shawn was the first person I turned to. My confidant. My fearless brother. In my eyes, he has always been an artist in the truest sense: someone who carries a message, who dares to engage others, who is brave enough to shape his turmoil into sound, image, and sensation. My whole life has been surrounded by creativity - my father, a painter and pianist; my mother, taking me to craft festivals; my brother, conjuring music, paintings, and culinary works of art that touched every sense. He doesn’t always believe me when I tell him, but he is my greatest inspiration.

Shawn was apprehensive at first - wondering if his work could stand beside artists across the globe, uncertain of what it meant to share something so personal with strangers. I maintain that his music has the potential to light up underground clubs in Berlin and across Europe. And yet, true to his nature, he called me almost every other day in the weeks before he even received the case. He ran through ideas - recording the sounds of his culinary experiments, building his quintessential techno beats that can twist your emotions with nothing but rhythm and layered voices. I told him what I always tell him: wait, pay attention - and (on cue) have fun.

When the case finally arrived, he called me. I was on my way home from Deaf Republic at the Royal Court Theatre, a play that had left me shaken, electric and inspired. He told me he was sampling film audio - fragments of dialogue that mirrored his own experience of psychosis. He explained how, in past manic episodes, the television seemed to speak directly to him, pulling him into alternate realities when he could no longer bear his own. He was blurring the line between cinema and self, between memory and imagination.

Shawn’s first major psychotic episode began when he was eleven and I was eight. This was a particularly frightening evening that to most - would shift their perspective of their sibling forever but to me, ignited my protective mechanism and while life threatening - allowed me to see him. Each episode has led him into institutions meant to heal but too often stalling him instead, leaving us scrambling to recognize the brother we love within the shell of someone unreachable.

Yet now, through our conversations - through art - I feel closer to him than ever before.

During his two weeks with the case, he shared sound samples with me, though I resisted listening fully until my own turn comes (which is months from now). I wanted him to feel supported, but I also wanted to protect the mystery of the project. That tense dichotomy sat heavy within me.

When it was over, Shawn told me the process had been “pretty fucking smooth” with his only concerns around the technical production and perception. He drank whiskey, experimented freely, and edited without pressure. His approach was fearless, playful, different from so many artists who hesitate, who agonize.

He wove together quotes from films that echoed his psychotic breaks, producing a soundscape where fiction and lived reality collide. To hold it, he chose a cassette tape - low-fi, imperfect, tactile. Inspired by Total Recall and its “memory tapes,” he wanted the medium itself to reflect the fragility and distortion of memory, the imperfections of mental health, the resistance of analog in a digital boom. A cassette, unlike a file, cannot be endlessly edited. Once recorded, it must simply exist, as it is. In that way, he created both a work and a shield: a selective archive, accessible only to those willing to listen with openness.

I asked if he had explored the other creatives’ work. He told me he’d only looked at the titles - most of which seemed to echo reflections on the fractured state of our world. He acknowledged that these problems must be faced, and that some of his music seeks to hold that mirror. But then he posed the question that lingered: “Even if you could change the world - how does that actually work?”

For him, the answer began not with the global, but with the intimate. While the world may be in disarray, he believed the deeper, more lasting work starts within. Change one’s internal world first, and perhaps that small shift can ripple outward - sparking change in others, creating a butterfly effect that stretches quietly, but powerfully, across the globe.

It struck me that many of the creatives in this project have never met (never even spoken) yet they are sharing intimate moments across borders, languages, political divides, genocides, and questions of human rights. What emerges is a quiet thread of dialogue, a reflection of this precise place and time. Through art, they are weaving connections that politics has never been able to achieve - bridging boundaries not with treaties, but with the raw honesty of human experience.

When I asked how he felt as the case left his hands, he admitted to nerves - concerned about perception, about execution, about imperfection. But he also spoke of joy. Imperfection, he said, is what makes art accessible, even inspiring. It’s not about flawless talent but about the message, the spark, the impact. His work was not an archive of place but of state - of his inner world at this moment in time, of the immense progress he has made since his last psychotic episode.

Listening to him, I thought again of the child’s mobile: delicate, fragile, shifting. Each movement reverberates across the whole, yet held together by invisible threads.

And like that mobile, art will always be there to steady the string when it begins to tremble.

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Follow the case in real time: @shayethiel