The Launderette: A festival of washing
Luke is an multi-disciplinary artist and designer, whose work blurs the lines between spatial practice, artistic intervention, and social commentary. Driven by an interest in the politics of space, his projects interrogate how architecture can reclaim and recommon the public realm in an era dominated by privatization. His approach often challenges the neutrality of efficient design, instead embracing messiness, informality, and resistance.
His latest project, The Launderette: A Festival of Washing, attempts to challenge the neoliberal underbelly of privately-owned, publicly accessible space [POPs].
Following the short exploratory film titled 'HUNG OUT TO DRY', the project proposes the drying of clothes as a method in subverting behavioural norms. This highlights the alienation these absurd spaces have to those unable to afford increasingly private commodities. Through communal washing, a long-established practice that's informal space has been at the heart of community for generations, these controlled landscapes are appropriated, and freed from capatilist agenda.
The end product becomes a series of artworks. Inspired by the philosophies of New Babylon, The Launderette imagines what this free public space could look like. By expanding on the washing line as a framework that facilitates moments, the project celebrates the value of mundane tasks in the collective experience of urban life, and rallies for their importance to be respected.
