Word as Play
Works that invite writing into the wild—through play, presence, and public encounter.
These works move writing off the desk and into the street, the café, the bench, the bar—anywhere life unfolds in real time. By weaving together imagination, setting, and interaction, they dissolve the boundary between writer and world. The participant becomes the narrator of the moment they’re inside. These works explore how place shapes perception, how physical space seeps into the language we choose, the rhythms we write in, and the characters we conjure. Playful, spontaneous, and sensory-driven, Word as Play invites curiosity as a writing method—letting strangers become muses, a shift in light reshape the narrative, and the world co-author the story.
Writing Safari
Public Writing Intervention / 2023–Present / Todos Santos, BCS, Mexico
Writing Safari — A guided writing encounter through town. Participants become the writer on the sidewalk bench, observing scenes and translating them into story through a series of timed prompts sent via WhatsApp. Each prompt shifts perspective, deepens presence, and activates the senses. After writing, the group regathers to read excerpts aloud and remix them into one collective narrative.
The HemmingWay
Place-Based Participatory Writing Encounter / June 14, 2024 / Todos Santos, BCS, Mexico
A writing experience inside the ambient hum of a bar or café, where place becomes both backdrop and muse, guiding narrative tension and tone. Using printed prompts and objects already in the environment, participants explore character, sensual detail, and the atmospheric charge of the space. The light, the textures, the intimacy of proximity—everything becomes material. The boundary between observation and participation blurs, and the writing absorbs it all.
Waffles & Word Play
Interactive Writing Salon / April 30, 2023 / Todos Santos, BCS, Mexico
A casual Sunday-morningish salon where language and breakfast intertwine. Participants co-created a living sentence wall using piles of cut-out nouns, verbs, articles, and punctuation. Each drink from the bar came with a set of randomly drawn words, sparking spontaneous contribution to the evolving text. The wall, divided into four vertical zones, invited individual interpretations—timeline, landscape, dream layers—shaping a layered, collective story over time. A second activity, inspired by the game of exquisite corpse, unfolded on a long roll of paper: sentence, drawing, sentence, drawing—each contribution seen in isolation until the final unrolling revealed a strange and wonderful narrative thread. Alongside the writing play, the space offered homemade waffles, coffee cocktails, zines, and materials for DIY publishing—all within an installation on self-publishing as a radical act of voice.
View photo gallery below.
