Gut Feeling: Memories from Peckham and Beyond
By Elida Silvey
Photos by Elida Silvey
It started with a flash of numbers as co-organizers Ella Monnerat and Bella Aleksandrova of Gut Feeling asked a room full of participants to introduce themselves with their favorite bus routes, names and pronouns. 8, 99, 244, echoed throughout Staffordshire St’s gallery walls forming the steady rhythm with which conversations about memory and their relation to South-East London were produced. Gut Feeling, co-created by Monnerat and Aleksandrova, runs workshops within some of the keystone galleries across London — Whitechapel Gallery and Staffordshire St, to name a couple — as well as a regular writing feedback group out of MayDay Rooms in Central London. Their latest workshop was the first of many events hosted as part of Staffordshire St’s Festival of Community, a yearly festival in the heart of South-East London that was created to celebrate the diversity of its community, which ran from August 10-20, 2023 with additional open studios sessions available from August 25-26, 2023.
As a carefully curated start to the festival, Monnerat and Aleksandrova began dissecting the triggers for memory by probing our senses with elements made to spur conversation between participants. The gallery space was split into a series of five tables, each adorned with a separate set of elements evoking different senses as potential cues for memory. Each participant was given a small piece of paper with a series of numbers, one through five, and told to move through the tables in the order shown on the stub, in order to discuss with each other what memories these items evoked. We were encouraged to write these thoughts down on the stitched transfer paper set in the middle of each table. The familiar sounds of TFL’s New Cross Gate station train stop were utilized to remind participants to move from table to table and hinted at the transitory relationship between place and memory.
Each element that Gut Feeling selected pulled memories out of participants and forced us to consider the deeper themes relating to memory — from its natural tendencies to concepts about identity and language — ultimately painting a clear picture of a vibrant community. I had a chat with a few participants post-workshop to try and understand the thoughts this workshop produced and found a spectrum of ideas relating to South-East London and beyond it.
On one of the tables, covered by crushed roses and muskbars, our sense of smell brought up tender recollections of childhood. One participant from Italy, who would like to go by the name Jaqueline, recalls “Each of those, because of the smell, would represent a moment and also a different area of what I was living and my childhood.” A table covered in posters calling for god and NHS eye checkups produced a similar feeling within me as my Mormon upbringing came into the conversation. Another participant thought about deeper themes of social consciousness with their written question, “Has the world changed since we stopped paying attention to it?” on the table lined with photographs of familiar cafes, parks and the Peckham boot sale.
Another participant reminisced on the transitory nature of memories after recalling a conversation they had while sitting at the table covered in spices, ingredients and snack packets, which participants were encouraged to taste test. “We were all focusing on South-East London, but I found it’s impossible to focus your memory on a single area because people were going off on tangents to their hometowns and other areas of London they’ve lived in or even countries that they’ve moved here from,” Harper Walton states. Being one of a number of immigrants in the room, I connected with Walton’s statement as I too found myself going off on tangents with my own memories strewn across America and Mexico. “Maybe it shows the contagiousness of memory,” Walton summarized, acknowledging the wayward nature of memory and the diversity of backgrounds that make up this community.
Conversations about cultural identity, language and the dexterity of memory were spurred on by a table lined with quotes from Sylvia Plath, Louise Bourgeois and Jean-Paul Sartre among others. One participant from Japan, Yuna Goda, shared her thoughts with me by comparing memory to a spider’s web: “I really like the idea of language as a spider's web, that’s also how I see memory […] because a spider's web is for catching things, right? It's strong enough to catch things and maybe it's strong enough to catch other memories but it has holes and it can break easily” she states. In asking her what she believed caused these tears in our memory webs, she stated “I think anything that is shocking or strong, whether it's a risk, positive or negative, I think it has the strength or energy to break some of those webs,” noting the delicate nature of memory and our ability to store the strongest emotions within them.
This made me think about my own intertwining relationship between language, emotion and memory. As a bilingual speaker, some of my memories exist in Spanish while others in English, and they too — like a spider’s web — can find themselves broken or mended by the people around me and the languages they speak.
Discussions about death and oblivion were also considered, brought on by the same set of quotes. Two participants responded to the following Annie Erneaux quote from The Years; “In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation”. They reminisce about their own feelings towards the concept of death with opposing statements; “I like the idea of becoming nothing,” one states, with an alternative point of view written right next to it, “That is the scariest thing in the world to me”. This made me think about my own stance on the subject matter as the concepts of being remembered vs. being forgotten entered my mind. This conversation and its culmination on paper are just one example of the introspective themes that were at the heart of Gut Feeling’s workshop.
While Gut Feeling’s workshop for Festival of Community was created with South-East London in mind, the conversations that came out of their curated collection of objects, photographs and food spoke to larger themes. Participants may have come to Staffordshire St to make a zine about their memories of South-East London but many, like myself, left with new ideas to consider. Monnerat and Aleksandrova produced the perfect environment for discussion and created a starting point from which artists can further develop their ideas surrounding memory within their own practices. I love going to workshops; They allow me to connect with my own writing practice in new and interesting ways. A good workshop, in my mind, is one where you leave long before it has left you. Even now, a few days after Gut Feeling’s workshop I’m left thinking about the concept of memory and the conversations I had at Staffordshire St. Perhaps it is impossible to pin your memories down onto a single place, those wiggling, faint, mind-maps finding a way to expand past Peckham to beyond. ♦
