Domestic reproductive labour is a form of care. By cleaning, cooking, washing a mother, wife, partner, sister, daughter, sibling allows the other members of the household to go to work and have leisure. But who is taking care of the womxn doing this labor? For this research project, the art and politics of washing collectively are exploited as a tool to create a conversation about the hierarchy in a household. Domestic reproductive labour, including washing is a labour that is often not acknowledged and done in isolation. Furthermore, it is a topic that is overlooked even though it evokes a multitude of questions in regards to ecology, consumption industry, power dynamics in the homecontext, etc. Nowadays laundry is done in the comfort of the home but in isolation. In contrast, in the past washing was a collective activity where women came to a central place, to the river or a water fountain to do their washing all together by hand. Although the fact that the labour of washing was a hard and time-consuming labour it was also a social moment for a lot of the women.

For the project Work values, valuable work, collective and manual washing is seen as a tool, a time taken for a conversation about the politics in the house. We leave the isolated domestic sphere to come together in a public space, in order to make unpaid care labour perceivable and create acknowledgment for the ones responsible. For this I organise work-shops where a group of two to eight individuals, from different ages and backgrounds who don’t necessarily know each other, stand around a washtub and manually wash the dirty linnen. It is a moment where questions about the politics of the house and the household are being asked and we reflect upon them together. Who is responsible for domestic labour? Who has the lead in a household?

How can doing laundry become a playful and collective activity, in order to make domestic reproductive labour visible and create dialogues about the politics of the home?