Nostalgia is a Fiction is an erasure poetry project that transforms discarded paperbacks into new works of visual and textual art. Words are obscured or isolated until the page yields a poem hidden within the original text: not destruction, but archaeology.
The source material, predominantly mass-market paperbacks from the 1960s to 1990s, carries the traces of a particular social world; working-class life, regional identity, and a Britain that is half-remembered and half-invented.
The project's title is both provocation and thesis: nostalgia is not reliable memory but a fiction we construct to make the past habitable. Each piece sits alongside Andrew Mitchell's wider practice of exploring obsolescence, place, and collective memory; an enduring investigation into how we inherit, misremember, and remake the stories that shaped us.
