“How did it feel to you? This morning?"
Gwilym asks me.
He’s standing at the sink washing the dishes from last night. I think about all the other people who have washed dishes at that sink. I imagine the people who rented this flat before us. And the people before them and before them. I wonder what their plates looked like. What they ate. What were they washing away down the sink? What conversations did they have in this kitchen? The traces they left behind. I think about this space when it was a complete house, not divided into three flats as it is now.
What does it mean to live in a place? What does it mean to belong to a place? Our starting point for our project is objects: dormant objects in a home which people do not think about that much, do not use, perhaps do not look at very often, but crucially, would never throw away. What do these objects say about a person, about their relationship to others, to themselves? How do people construct selfhood and relationships from these seemingly everyday, nothingy things?
I feel exhilarated. I feel tearful. I feel frustrated.
Who’s on the other side of the door?
A picture in our family album. Aged one, on the drive of my Nan’s house on Norfolk Road, S2. Learning to walk. Lots of photos of that birthday, partly because it was my first and partly taken to send to my father who wasn’t there. My mother’s documentation of me.
Not our drive anymore.
What does it mean to make theatre in a city that you have roots in? That is coloured by family histories, mythologies. But also to be discovering it anew:
Going back there, aged 25, posting an invitation through the letterbox.
Taking flowers to City Road cemetery. The bloodline of my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother.
Mum was born on Manor Lane. Hope Villas. Round the corner from Sky Edge.
Strangely quiet. Peace.
The man with his pigeons. The woman leaning on her windowsill, dressing gown and hair done up in a towel from a shower, looking out.
The three friends. Those friendships of threes.
“No cold callers. No free newspapers. No takeaway menus. No leaflets. No nothing.”
Soraya Nabipour
@Snabipour
Gwilym asks me.
He’s standing at the sink washing the dishes from last night. I think about all the other people who have washed dishes at that sink. I imagine the people who rented this flat before us. And the people before them and before them. I wonder what their plates looked like. What they ate. What were they washing away down the sink? What conversations did they have in this kitchen? The traces they left behind. I think about this space when it was a complete house, not divided into three flats as it is now.
What does it mean to live in a place? What does it mean to belong to a place? Our starting point for our project is objects: dormant objects in a home which people do not think about that much, do not use, perhaps do not look at very often, but crucially, would never throw away. What do these objects say about a person, about their relationship to others, to themselves? How do people construct selfhood and relationships from these seemingly everyday, nothingy things?
I feel exhilarated. I feel tearful. I feel frustrated.
Who’s on the other side of the door?
A picture in our family album. Aged one, on the drive of my Nan’s house on Norfolk Road, S2. Learning to walk. Lots of photos of that birthday, partly because it was my first and partly taken to send to my father who wasn’t there. My mother’s documentation of me.
Not our drive anymore.
What does it mean to make theatre in a city that you have roots in? That is coloured by family histories, mythologies. But also to be discovering it anew:
Going back there, aged 25, posting an invitation through the letterbox.
Taking flowers to City Road cemetery. The bloodline of my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother.
Mum was born on Manor Lane. Hope Villas. Round the corner from Sky Edge.
Strangely quiet. Peace.
The man with his pigeons. The woman leaning on her windowsill, dressing gown and hair done up in a towel from a shower, looking out.
The three friends. Those friendships of threes.
“No cold callers. No free newspapers. No takeaway menus. No leaflets. No nothing.”
Soraya Nabipour
@Snabipour
