REVIEW: Mexican Artist Regina Avendaño launches ‘Eight Nights’ poetry installation in SE London 

By Elena K. Cruz

In a breathless burst of poetry, the creative culture of Southeast London has become both mystified and tethered to the community through the perspective of Mexican writer Regina Avendaño Trueba, through her large-scale, immersive poetry project Eight Nights.

For her three-mile-long project stretching between Peckham and Lewisham, Avendaño Trueba framed and installed poems outside eight curated businesses in an act that combines public art with the written word. Then, she outlined the route to walk between each sight with avant-garde maps printed online and on flyers installed at the selected sites.

Avendaño Trueba has created a path: one that connects Southeast London cultural hubs to each other, one that attaches personal anecdotes to the rush of lively, communal spaces, and one that links her Mexican background with her experiences living in London for half a decade.

Placed outside the family-run pub Skehans, Nunhead, Avendaño Trueba’s Poem At Skehans outlines the following:

“Flowers placed parched beside your hand, and my hand. The headstone of your Moscow blue coat. Impressions picked from your father. Watching the sun fall at 200 beats per minute. Commanding a series of small unrelated disasters. With fifteen boys and their dates, humming along. Knocked off the high stool. Drinking in rounds. A green slot machine throwing out the winning horse. Tomorrow I’ll dream of tourists. Me and five others. Coming back to this night to see you, over and over again.”

The poetry mixes stream-of-consciousness storytelling with a reinterpretation of Surrealist language, pulling and pushing the reader through an expedition of memory, the warping present, and the endless possibilities for the future. Avendaño Trueba’s writing effortlessly directs the audience from tales of goofy men on barstools to the related reflections on history, gently spinning the reader along the way, as if the writing itself is a loose pathway that encourages an aimless traveler to take in the world around them. Through her ethereal hand, Avendaño Trueba’s tales from the day-to-day become art.

“It’s all just someone simply drinking in a pub, that’s what the eight poems are,” Avendaño Trueba explained outside Skehans during the opening night. “But in each one, I’ve kind of tried to have the social-political context, and a reflection of what’s happening in my wider life, the things that exist outside of it.”

Avendaño Trueba said this while wearing a portable headset — as well as a cheeky smile at the dorkiness of her attire — as she led a crowd of 24 audience members on her pub-slash-poetry walk from establishment to establishment to celebrate the 22nd of February opening. Politely pacing among the sidewalks, the two-dozen audience members ranged from their mid-20s to early-40s and listened intently to her work. This included an additional poem, Baby, which she read for the evening to discuss the cross-over with language and community:

“and when I deliver five kids from Juarez to your feet, they’re all dead. While this is mostly a metaphor, five mothers are always standing by my bed, asking me to give my place up. I’m considering this as I breastfeed my reflection, hand free shots to boys with dirty blonde mullets, while the entire continent celebrates my poise, my perfect hair, this je ne sais quoi, and all together they wonder how my English has gotten so good. I tell them my first word was water. Or baby. But either way, I said it just like that: in another language. If you keep taking a right every time you’re about to get home – eventually you understand direction. A system of incompleteness.”

Successfully intermingling cultural influences once more, Eight Nights follows in the tradition of 19th-century French les flâneurs, in which one discovers the wonders within their vicinity and around the world through aimless meandering.

“The process of writing each poem included a philosophy of play, as well as the double presence between imagination and time,” the Eight Nights website reads. “Through this exercise, the poem does not only become tainted by the heart of a space but in turn, feeds back new life to its locality.”

The poems are available for view from the 22nd of February until late spring 2025 at the following pubs:

SET Social, 55a Nigel Rd, London SE15 4NP

Nags Head Peckham, 231 Rye Ln, London SE15 4TP

Royal George, 85 Tanner’s Hill, London SE8 4QD

Marquis of Granby, 322 New Cross Rd, London SE14 6AT

The Shirker’s Rest, 9 Lewisham Way, London SE14 6PP

Amersham Arms, 388 New Cross Rd, London SE14 6TY

Skehans, 1 Kitto Rd, London SE14 5TW

Fox & Firkin, 316 Lewisham High St, London SE13 6JZ