Eavesdropping is a recontextualization and creative response to everything I overheard and then documented in various areas around London, combining both listening and walking. 

In my process group, we did a small workshop of redoing an existing piece of writing in a few ways, cutting them up and arranging them to tell a new story. This loosely inspired the idea to do the same, though with verbal conversations I was never meant to pay attention to. The word “flavor” from the brief also impacted how I ended up viewing the project, though this didn’t come out until after I had processed a couple days of documenting the words I heard. 

Depending where you were, themes could easily be extracted, even from the simplest of phrases - in a way, each area is a collective of shared experiences. There is a commonality and relatability between those sharing the same spaces, which gets into our group’s overall symposium idea and has led to a lot of new revelations myself. Creating “free verse” poems from what I eavesdropped, I tried to capture the overall sentiments of those spaces - the “spirit” of them and what I felt while I listened. I used slightly different mediums, all present in my practice already, to bring those poems to life. I am an extremely conversational researcher - observing and “listening” was a unique experience for me, but it further deepened my inclination to emotion and expression. 

It also led to an interesting question, which was - is a collective still a collective if it is not consensual?