Lynne Sachs presents The Washing Society + Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry @ Shapeshifters Cinema, Nov 11, 2025
Posted October 14th, 2025 in Announcements, Co-Presentations, Events and Screenings, News / Events
Lynne Sachs presents The Washing Society + Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry
7pm Tuesday, November 11, 2025
Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland
Co-presented by the Friends of Canyon Cinema
Admission: $10 (discount for Shapeshifters members; free for Friends of Canyon)
Event tickets here
NYC-based filmmaker Lynne Sachs joins us for a deep, poetic dive into laundry—an area of focus she has examined over the past decade, through her film The Washing Society (co-directed with Lizzie Olesker) and a new book, Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry, just released by Punctum Books.
Along with a screening of The Washing Society, Lynne will present a performative reading, with Shapeshifters Programming Director Kathleen Quillian, of excerpts from Hand Book as well as engage in a discussion about the book, film, and process with Canyon Cinema Executive Director Brett Kashmere.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase and can be signed by the artist after the event.
The Washing Society (Lizzie Olesker & Lynne Sachs, 2018, 45 minutes, color, sound)
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
Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process and the Labor of Laundry
by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs (punctum books, 2025)
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 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.
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.
“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
