Spence Bakery
I wanted to say
The Spence Bakery, Stoke Newington Church Street
8th – 30th January 2010
Four hanging cup-and-string telephones, suspended from the walls, invite customers to pull them to their ears.
The Spence bakery and café is a busy local meeting spot where people come together to share a conversation over a cup of coffee. The words and rhythms of these encounters, over time, become soaked into the fabric of the café.
The cup-and-string telephones are a physical reminder that sound is a series of vibrations, a sense that can get lost with modern devices like mobile phones. The telephones are a stripped-back way of communicating: naïve, childish, playful.
Each cup captures and contains different fragments of thoughts, feelings and conversations, drawn from customers in the cafe and spoken by the staff who work there. By choosing to put the cup to their ear, listeners allow themselves to reconsider the nature of communication and our urge to interact, as well as the social importance of venues like the Spence.