BIENNALE ARCIPELAGO MEDITERRANEO:
TWO DURATIONAL WORKS
Project
THE WASHERWOMEN & PRODOTTO SICILIANO
In 2022-23, I was selected as part of 22 young European artists to work with artist Egle Oddo and curator Başak Senova to create performance and exhibition pieces for the opening ceremony of the Biennale Arcipelago Mediterraneo (BAM) 2022 in Palermo, Sicily.
Romanians account for 23% of migrants in Sicily, the majority of them women working in agriculture and domestic care (taking care of children, but predominantly of the elderly and the sick). I was in Sicily to make art and to enjoy the beaches. These works are in dialogue with legal researcher and activist, Alessandra Sciurba (Palermo University), and sociologist A R Hochschild. They are an attempt to grapple with the structural inequalities that have also benefitted me.
We produced a publication that captures the process and the conversations we had among us as artists. Get in touch if you want to read it.
Prodotto Siciliano
“…we make a fetish of an SUV, for example—we see the thing independent of its context. We
disregard the men who harvested the rubber latex, the assembly-line workers who bolted on the
tires, and so on..” (A R Hochschild, Love and Gold)
I wanted to interrogate the fetishizing of Sicilian produce grown in Ragusa, tended to and grown by hands that are not Sicilian in the slightest. At the moment, the majority belong to Romanian & Moldovan women, who due to structural inequalities within the EU, can occupy the position of slaves in Sicilian farms. I used different parts of my body (also Romanian, also migrant, but crucially, present in Sicily to make art and enjoy the beaches) to crush the produce (see photos) and then added gold foil to the cracks,
where mould would begin to grow. Over 3 months, the vegetables rotted and their smell filled the room, they lost structural integrity, dropped from the wire and generally made amess. This is also a challenge to the artistic notion of ‘still life’: the migratory movement that has to happen for these fruit & vegetables to come into being is mirrored by the process of decomposition.
See photos of the process below.
The Washerwomen
Durational performance (circa 2 hours), in the courtyard of Palazzo Sant’Elia, Palermo, Sicily. During the opening ceremony there were dance, visual & musical performances taking place in the courtyard simultaneously.
I wanted this to be an unbroken performance of the washing and wringing out of sheets: a reminder that domestic work is constantly going on somewhere, imperceptible and taken for granted. I wanted my physical presence in the palazzo space to stand in stark contrast to the architecture of the courtyard, and particularly the statues, sculpted with their folds of material. Beautiful, young, coveted, upper class women face to face with working-class female migrant labour, so coveted that it is, in fact, exploited.
This labour, perceived because it is performed (the laundry is literally hung out to dry), also benefits from hidden, invisible labour. This piece was not possible solo, it relied on people helping me up on the balcony (where they cannot be seen), offering counterweight, holding the sheets so they could drop down slowly as I washed them.
The inspiration for this piece came from my reservations about making this work-while I am Romanian, I am not the one doing this kind of work. This is also why I wore a frivolous and slightly outrageous bikini while crushing the fruit and vegetables for Prodotto Siciliano, because ‘someone like me’ comes to Sicily on an artistic residency, on vacation. However, I visited the Romanian Orthodox Church on the first Sunday we had in Palermo, and within ten minutes of arriving at the church, I was approached by an Italian woman who asked if I was Romanian and if I wanted work looking after her elderly, sick mother. By virtue of being a Romanian woman and placing my body in that space (I have a great photo of where I was standing when she came over to me, there was a sign on the floor that said ‘Il tuo posto e qui’), I was involved and implicated as well.
