Eight nights:
public poetry installation
An exploration of intimacy, surrealism, and public space.
Traced on the shared walls of SE London, Regina Avendaño has left a poetry collection fully haunted by the metropolitan spectator, as well as the wandering disorder between public intimacies and social realities. Through an exercise in psycho-geography, Regina has produced eight poems that narrate the surreal characters and anxieties that plague the nightlife of South East London.
Dragging the reader, half drunk and stumbling through Peckham, we are introduced to God scraping words onto a bathroom stall, a child playing hopscotch over the poverty line, the watch-dogs outside Trotsky’s garden, and an angel shot in the foot. The pieces play in between personal narrative and introductions to the apocalypse. By creating physical forms and personas for the realities of gentrification, privatisation, and class division in London, the author lets our political emergencies inhabit our daily life, and laugh with us.
This large-scale, art installation, was designed, curated and set-up by Regina Avendaño, a Mexican poet and artist based in London. Each poem was printed and framed outside the pub it was inspired by and in which the night that the author retells took place. Avant-garde inspired maps have been printed and placed alongside each framed piece, inviting spectators into their own walk.
Outside the Fox n Firkin, Regina opens the poem with the disillusioned excess that frames the body of the night:
“At the party, you ask me if it’s habit or sorrow. Elena is holding the only proof of a body, God’s giant head, two blows of ketamine. Neither of us are satisfied.”
Outside the Marquis, the night ends:
“This whole time I’ve been saving lampshades in my pocket. Trailing dust down my pint. We’re talking about throwing a year away, but I wasn’t listening. Anger is building a skylight out of toothpicks, collapsing federal loans, and all sorts of things I could tell you are auctioned under the noise of construction.”
But the collection opens at Set Social Peckham, a young artist hub, with its title piece poking fun at its own self-aware population:
“God spends the entire night locked in the bathroom stall. Engraving all their clichés into the door with an army knife. And you, sat next to them, repeating: I don’t believe you, I don’t believe you. There’s an argument to be made for worship, but that’s not what I came here to tell you. Some days you have to push in with everything empty. Let the bartender know you’ve been cheated. That you meant to say something much more eloquent. That Angus is outside smoking your cigarette, rolling down his symbols. The banality of youth taunting: watch me, watch me, watch me.”
Eight Nights is a challenging project, joining the worlds of street art and poetry. With the storytelling and lyric of Regina Avendaño, the pieces are sure to remain as markers and odes to a generation and the disquiet that surrounds it.
The poems have been available for public view since February 2025, and will remain there until further notice.
