Screening
On Saturday, October 25th, at 7pm, you are invited to The Film-Makers' Cooperative for a screening of Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker's experimental documentary THE WASHING SOCIETY, followed by a performative live reading and book signing, by Sachs, of their new book HAND BOOK: A MANUAL ON PERFORMANCE, PROCESS, AND THE LABOR OF LAUNDRY.
This is not a play. It is something else.
Call it a blueprint, a map, a documentation
of something that has already happened
but could happen again —
a rendering in book form of a film and a performance.
Making a mark, words on a page instead of bodies in space.
A book that contains what’s remembered and what could be.
All of it written down and placed here, into this
Hand Book: A Manual.
“I’ve been creating with playwright Lizzie Olesker since 2014. Together, we’ve discovered a shared interest in making work that magnifies quotidian elements of life in NYC. In those early years, we couldn’t yet know that our first site-specific pieces would lead to a ten-year collaboration in which we produced Every Fold Matters, a live film performance, and The Washing Society, a hybrid film. Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry marks our third iteration. For us, our book offers space for readers to think about the politics and history of service work, art-making, and aesthetic experimentation.”
You are the audience now,
reading a book instead of watching and listening,
turning the page,
moving from one discourse to another,
holding a container,
its contours informed by our thoughts,
and in turn,
shaping your experience.
The Washing Society (co-directed by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs, 45 min. film, 2018)
When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Sachs and Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there.
“The legacy of domestic work, the issues surrounding power, and the exchange of money for services are all potent themes which rise to the surface and bubble over in dramatic, thrilling escalations of the everyday.” – The Brooklyn Rail
“An exercise in high-concept cinema to which Olesker and Sachs devote three quarters of an hour of film stock and many more quarters in tips, revealing the stains (of racism and classicism) on an American Dream that seems to want to scrub away every last trace of its own identity.” - Otro Cines Europa, Punto de Vista International Film Festival)
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A performative reading and book signing from: Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process and the Labor of Laundry by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs. (punctum books, 2025).
Hand Book guides us through the making of a hybrid performance and film focused on laundromat workers - those who are paid to wash and fold for others. This illuminating dialogue between cinema, theater, and labor invites us to think about the intimacy of touching other people’s clothes. Turning a page becomes an interactive, quasi-cinematic encounter, calling to mind the intimacy of touching other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body.
“This generously kaleidoscopic offering invites readers to think through the labor of laundry via an impressive array of modes in an interactive collage of perspectives, histories and bodies” –Christopher Harris
"The best of art manifests an ordinary devotion to experiences that become extraordinary given enough care and attention, or an extraordinary devotion to conveying the genuine depth of what passes for the ordinary. Here it is, both at once.” –Paul Chan