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It starts with change

When I first heard about the QDT Laundrette project and saw Eleanor Finlay-Christensen’s illustration above, it was this phrase that really stuck with me afterwards. It felt very fitting for July 2020, as many overdue and difficult conversations take place about what changes need to happen, on so many levels, in order to dismantle white supremacy and end black people’s ongoing trauma. It also simplified some of what I have wanted to say to people who have sent me, their brown friend, awkward and upsetting messages in recent weeks: Don’t tell me what you are going to do, just start doing it. It starts with change. Let’s do this. 

I felt relief to become a part of this project. Although I do find it cathartic and healing to write about trauma, I have been writing a lot about racism recently. This is still important and will continue as we push the movement forward and keep fighting for justice and meaningful change. But in the meantime, it’s a welcome and quite calming change to also be working on a creative project about something else. 

That said, who knows what will come up. I will be making a special effort to engage with marginalised groups of people who use laundrettes and hope to amplify voices that we tend to hear less from in the arts.  

“It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.”

- Junot Díaz

Please don’t overload me

This photo above, from QDT’s call out to artists is the other image that stuck with me the first time I read about the project. Again it felt quite fitting for right now, and with both images I also thought to myself, found poetry has found me again

Found Poetry is when words or whole phrases are taken from pre-existing texts and restructured or added to, often to change the meaning. It is often described as the literary equivalent of a collage.

“By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles.” 

- Annie Dillard, Mornings Like This

Working in this way is one of those things that I just started doing one day and then later found out was actually a thing when I was studying Creative Arts and working as a duo back in 2009-2011. We created a few works of intentional found poetry - such as an alternative Rimmel London advert made by rearranging quotes and images that we found particularly amusing from their actual campaigns.

Although I am currently working on poetry projects, it has been a while since I have played with found poetry, at least in its purest form of creating whole new works entirely made up of existing text. 

So as I begin to search for stories and visit local laundrettes in Brighton, it will be interesting to see if existing texts call out to me and demand to have their context doubled or meaning expanded…