What's so interesting about Laundry anyway?

Welcome to our blog! We're Dee Hassan and Holly Beasley-Garrigan. Dee is a journalist and filmmaker and Holly is a choreographer and performance maker. We both live and work in Bristol. Together we create site specific film and projection installations that aim to unearth untold stories in ways that make people think. We'll post a mix of diary entries, documentations and thought processes here as we work our way through this project. We're excited to get stuck in!

We were drawn to this project because of the call to document and record people's everyday experiences in a setting that isn't ordinarily explored. It struck us how perfect a laundrette is as a location for mining stories. We love connecting with people in places that are familiar to them - instead of a studio or art space - somewhere they might be performing an everyday ritual, where they’re less guarded and more open to conversation. So we’re excited by the potential of exploring stories through laundry. What kinds of clothes are people washing? Who are they washing for? How has the laundry load changed during lockdown? What sentimental or cultural value do the clothes we launder hold?

Dee's laundry load has changed a lot during the Covid-19 pandemic as she spends more and more time at home in non-western clothes. Her own experience of laundrettes is from the days she spent helping her mum with huge loads for the whole family in the laundry room basement of their tower block in Sweden. Sitting together, passing time and waiting for the cycle to finish became an unintentionally intimate routine. The laundrette allowed them just to sit still and talk without distractions - to each other or to other patrons of the business - something that feels increasingly rare in the city she now calls home.

As a filmmaker of colour, Dee is looking forward to using this as an opportunity to connect with laundrettes that might be run and/or used by immigrant communities in Bristol. Launderette presents a unique chance to see how lockdown has affected these communities and we're interested in how participants' laundry loads may have changed - in exploring public/private space through the fabrics people connect with culturally. We've been inspired by stories of At The Well in Bristol helping residents of Lansdowne House access laundry services during lockdown, and we're especially drawn to stories from our local area of Easton (where Lansdowne House is located).

We're looking forward to our first meeting with At The Well today! We'll check back here next week with how it goes...