Spoken scripts are frequently used in my videos, performances and installations. Sometimes they are ways of documenting fieldwork and conversations in a confidential or transformative way. Here are some that escaped being irredeemably scrunched at the bottom of my schoolbag/dropbox, covered in squashed banana/datahoarding.
All My Lives is a surreal poetic rant that I made as a way of 'writing up' things discussed while doing my 1:1 cleaning and life planning service 'Why Don't We Live Together'. This intimate performance was a bookable service I ran on about 20 occasions. I helped strangers clean their homes for an hour while we planned (highly speculatively) how we might live if we were to spend the rest of our lives together. It was shown at Arebyte Laser gallery alongside an installation of sculpture-collages relating to the speculative lives. The life planning performances were intimate and private, so this was a way of anonymising them whilst also documenting them somehow.
Short poetic stories, starting with one about the shopping centre in Walthamstow, originally played from inside a slightly ajar empty Dulux white paint can. Showed as part of an installation at The Koppel Project, London. Performed live sometimes.
Audio installation shown alongside a bottle of sludge labelled 'sorry but all the objects I promised you had to be distilled into a syrup to make space for more stuff in the world'. Solo show at The Function Room, Cock Tavern, Somers Town.
As part of my unofficial shopping centre residency in Westfield Stratford (London) with Arebyte Gallery, I worked with grime rapper Maxsta to make a music track using words cut out of the Argos shopping catalogue as lyrics. The grime genre originates from this part of London, and the mall is said to be built on top of a former grime venue. Unlike some commercial rap, grime is often anarchic and political- more likely to question consumerism and power than glorify it. In this track, grime is used to reinterpret product descriptions to create a playfully subversive nonsense narrative. Written by me, performed by Maxsta.