After the breakup of a relationship and/or an argument worthy of starting WWIII, we often torture ourselves with the things said and unsaid for days, weeks or even a lifetime afterwards. What My Ex Said was born from a relatively nasty breakup but because I am not a narcissistic sociopath, rather than make a whole project out of what only -my- ex said, I took to social media and asked people to anonymously submit the things they'd had said to them by their exes, positive or negative, or maybe even something they'd said to an ex. I had a good response with over 60 submissions.

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From these submissions, What My Ex Said became an interactive social experiment. I made 52 of the quotes into cards which I randomly left lying around London and Herefordshire, waiting to be found, with the instructions that whomever finds the card must then pick it up and leave it in a place that is special or significant to them - after all, the ghosts of words once said are not the only things that live on in your memory, places also trigger strong emotional relapses. The reason for this is that these words needed to be shouted out into the wild, not just put in a frame in an exhibition room. Some of the quotes are raw and honest and just -imagine- if the person who once said it happened across a card with their strong words on it? Would they be willing to recognise those words as their own?

 

The cards have knowingly travelled as far as Cardiff, Bristol and Berlin. I like to think the rest are still floating around in the wild and travelling to lovely places or maybe even creased and folded up in someone’s wallet halfway across the world, but perhaps in the cases of some of the harsher cards, they deserve to be lost forever.

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The project has been revived on Instagram! You can find it here.