janina white
ISABEL ARDEN
In October 2025, I started a YouTube channel called Isabel Arden Initially, I wanted to experiment with generative AI: to explore what I could create by bringing words, music and images together.
Gradually, the experiments became a music diary.
I was living through the first year of my struggle with institutions, under enormous emotional and psychological pressure. My professional skills helped me deal with documents, arguments and proceedings. Music gave me somewhere to put everything those documents could not contain.
There were moments when creating helped preserve my sanity. At its most difficult, that period made the project feel essential to staying alive. It gave me something to make, something to anticipate, and a way to remain connected to myself.
Isabel Arden: Each Release, Its Own World
ISABEL is a London-based music and visual storytelling project. Each release has its own world: a different genre, voice, language or visual form.
The continuity lies in the care given to each piece. I want the form to follow the story, allowing each song to find the sound and imagery that belong to it.
The project speaks primarily in English and Spanish, alongside explorations in other languages. Generative AI is part of my creative process, opening possibilities for experimenting with musical and visual expression. My role is to develop the idea, shape its direction and decide what feels true to the experience behind it.
The Languages Inside Me
In my essay I Am Ukraine, I explored how the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian cultures I grew up between influence my responses to uncertainty, conflict and freedom.
I described them as personal cultural codes: inherited stories, habits and associations that I could suddenly recognise operating within me.
Music made those differences audible. Russian emerged in an operatic work. Polish, despite its importance in my life, resisted becoming melody. Ukrainian unlocked something fluid, earthy and intensely expressive.
One song, Кола на воді — Circles on the Water, follows a woman throwing stones into water and watching their ripples meet. As I wrote it, I recognised my own changing attention: from isolated events towards the patterns connecting them.
The song helped me articulate something I was also discovering through law and technology. I could not control every outcome, but I could learn how things moved—and decide how to navigate.
That is why music has become such an important part of my work. Sometimes a song allows me to understand an experience before I can explain it in prose.
Towards Documentary and Fiction
I now want to extend this work into documentary and fiction film.
My background in journalism, supported by a master’s degree in journalism and political science, gives me a foundation for documentary inquiry. My legal work adds close attention to evidence, competing accounts and the consequences of language.
My ongoing story offers material I want to explore on screen: an intimate relationship becoming an institutional matter, descriptions acquiring authority, and a woman trying to discover how decisions about her were made. The story continues to develop, revealing connections and contradictions that were invisible at the beginning.
For fiction, one of my favourite references is Fauda. I am particularly interested in co-creator and actor Lior Raz’s journey from operational experience into storytelling. That proximity to the world being portrayed gives the drama a texture I find compelling.
I want to bring the same attention to lived detail into my own work: how people speak under pressure, what they leave unsaid, and how private loyalties become entangled with professional roles.
Isabel Arden began as an experiment. It has become a creative practice through which I can understand my experiences, give them form and imagine what comes next.
Explore Isabel Arden on YouTube
Support the project
Gradually, the experiments became a music diary.
I was living through the first year of my struggle with institutions, under enormous emotional and psychological pressure. My professional skills helped me deal with documents, arguments and proceedings. Music gave me somewhere to put everything those documents could not contain.
There were moments when creating helped preserve my sanity. At its most difficult, that period made the project feel essential to staying alive. It gave me something to make, something to anticipate, and a way to remain connected to myself.
Isabel Arden: Each Release, Its Own World
ISABEL is a London-based music and visual storytelling project. Each release has its own world: a different genre, voice, language or visual form.
The continuity lies in the care given to each piece. I want the form to follow the story, allowing each song to find the sound and imagery that belong to it.
The project speaks primarily in English and Spanish, alongside explorations in other languages. Generative AI is part of my creative process, opening possibilities for experimenting with musical and visual expression. My role is to develop the idea, shape its direction and decide what feels true to the experience behind it.
The Languages Inside Me
In my essay I Am Ukraine, I explored how the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian cultures I grew up between influence my responses to uncertainty, conflict and freedom.
I described them as personal cultural codes: inherited stories, habits and associations that I could suddenly recognise operating within me.
Music made those differences audible. Russian emerged in an operatic work. Polish, despite its importance in my life, resisted becoming melody. Ukrainian unlocked something fluid, earthy and intensely expressive.
One song, Кола на воді — Circles on the Water, follows a woman throwing stones into water and watching their ripples meet. As I wrote it, I recognised my own changing attention: from isolated events towards the patterns connecting them.
The song helped me articulate something I was also discovering through law and technology. I could not control every outcome, but I could learn how things moved—and decide how to navigate.
That is why music has become such an important part of my work. Sometimes a song allows me to understand an experience before I can explain it in prose.
Towards Documentary and Fiction
I now want to extend this work into documentary and fiction film.
My background in journalism, supported by a master’s degree in journalism and political science, gives me a foundation for documentary inquiry. My legal work adds close attention to evidence, competing accounts and the consequences of language.
My ongoing story offers material I want to explore on screen: an intimate relationship becoming an institutional matter, descriptions acquiring authority, and a woman trying to discover how decisions about her were made. The story continues to develop, revealing connections and contradictions that were invisible at the beginning.
For fiction, one of my favourite references is Fauda. I am particularly interested in co-creator and actor Lior Raz’s journey from operational experience into storytelling. That proximity to the world being portrayed gives the drama a texture I find compelling.
I want to bring the same attention to lived detail into my own work: how people speak under pressure, what they leave unsaid, and how private loyalties become entangled with professional roles.
Isabel Arden began as an experiment. It has become a creative practice through which I can understand my experiences, give them form and imagine what comes next.
Explore Isabel Arden on YouTube
Support the project
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