(Regina Avendaño, 2025)
Inspired by les flâneurs, Eight Nights is a collection of aimless observations. The work recounts eight separate nights in South East London. Each piece situates the ambivalent individual into a phantasmagoria of modern quality. Narrating encounters, apocalypses, and incompleteness, the pieces speak out with the same disorder as memory.
The collection aimed to retake Debord’s psycho-geography, which emphasises emotional responses and connection through the formation of arbitrary routes in the city. The practice of psycho-geography is to walk without aim. In this view, wandering provides a rethinking of space, histories, and margins (both physical and imagined) within the city. Applied to current times, this Situationalists’ philosophy can also help challenge the daily experience of privatisation, late-stage capitalism, and borders.
An exercise in poetic entropy, Eight Nights makes use of the city and approaches it with the intention of re-appropriating its structure. The process of writing each poem included a philosophy of play, as well as the double presence between imagination and time. Through this exercise, the poem does not only become tainted by the heart of a space but in turn, feeds back new life to its locality. Chombart de Lauwe notes that an urban neighbourhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighbourhoods have of it. (Paris et l’agglomération parisienne, 1952)
This project includes eight poems placed outside the eight different pubs that inspired them across SE London. Readers and fellow walkers are invited to place themselves physically beside the collection and create their own aimless wandering in doing so. We do encourage audiences to note down their own observations - and to share them with us through our contact page.
For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world... (Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, (Le Figaro), 1863)
Eight Nights was developed by Regina Avendaño (London, Mexico).
Illustrations commissioned from Eleni Dimopoulos.