The Sign Collectors (Jackie Lou & Roz Currie)

Limehouse Cuts

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all our lives in many ways. This project grew out of two neighbours’ shared obsession with the signs that have popped up about the virus. From the beginning of the lockdown, we, Jackie and Roz, have explored signage in the area local to our home, Limehouse Marina. This film weaves together our photographs, our words and our thoughts, reflecting how we have processed the changes in our external world. Roz’s diary recalls the alien nature of the first few months of lockdown while Jackie deconstructs the signs and reconstitutes them as poems. The work recomposes fragments of experience into a landscape of memory, dream, and distant conversations.

Roz Currie is a community curator with an interest in contemporary culture, social history, women’s history and around ideas of identity. From working with the children of Holocaust survivors at the Jewish Museum, to the women of Holloway Prison at Islington Museum, she supports people in making their voices heard and exploring outsider histories. She has worked with many local communities and spends time listening and trying to understand the lived experience of others before bringing these stories to a wider community. Originally from Yorkshire, Roz has lived in Limehouse Marina for 6 years, and has grown to love the area so cannot imagine ever leaving!

Jackie Jia Louis a sociolinguist at Birkbeck College, University of London who is fascinated by language, space, and place. While she uses empirical research methods to examine their interactions in academic work, she often finds herself turning to art and poetry to explore and reflect upon her own relationship with the spaces she has inhabited as a transnational migrant. Born and raised in Shanghai, China, she moved to London via Washington, DC and Hong Kong, but feels most at home on her narrowboat in Limehouse.

PREMIERE: Saturday 28 November at 1pm