Please note that this event is taking place at The Feminist Library, Sojourner Truth Community Centre, 161 Sumner Rd, London SE15 6JL. RSVP below for this in person event. By purchasing a ticket with donation, you directly support our programme.

Join artist Mandy Merzaban for a workshop about making poetry out of really bad comms.

We are beyond words all the time… and live in a time beyond words. In the isolating, existential gap between, is no shortage of bad comms. By bad comms, I mean forms of communication in personal/professional settings that use colonial (or masquerading decolonial rhetoric), passive aggressive convivial, ‘objective’, normative, careerist, capitalist, patriarchal, (on and on) patronising language and tactics. 

bad comms poetry is a workshop about/for making poetry out of the eye-roll inducing, absurd, maddening messages, emails, texts, institutional statements, articles, legal contracts, rejection letters (or anything in between) we’ve received/seen/read and feel the need/desire to dissect and discombobulate. 

Let’s come together and connect around our collective refusal of bad comms!  

Participants will be asked to send in a short snippet of ‘bad comms’ before the session– something they’ve received, or read or gossiped about that left them feeling isolated, frustrated, or confused, and that they feel comfortable enough to engage with poetically. Please bring a snippet (200+ words) of bad comms from an email, text, press release, statement, or any body of text you’ve read or received that you’d like to use in the poetry workshop. You can bring this as a print out or on a device you can refer to.’ We will keep things anonymised so you do not have to share the institution/persons/identities but we will focus on the language and terminologies for poetry making.

The language of these texts will become part of a word repository—a ‘bad comms’ word bank—that each of us can draw on for poetry-making. The workshop will include a series of brief, collaborative prompts, creative constraints and playful exercises where participants get to react, chat and compose poetic reply about what they might say, if poetry was the only way. 

This session is part of the year-long project common /play\ grounds led by yasamin and sass. common /play\ grounds sides with our new programme strand Mujaawarah (neighbouring) striving to nurture rootedness and community, shared wisdom and wellbeing.

Mandy Merzaban is a London-based artist and writer investigating experiences of epistemic injustice, the systematic undervaluing and exclusion of knowledge based on such markers as race, class, gender and language, in arts and culture organisations. Through listening, drawing, performance and poetry, she explores the phenomenology of institutions and concealed experiences of institutional violence. Her current research project explores developing a collaborative lexicon of counter-institutional knowledge making.