The Laundry Room

Performative lecture @ What Remains, DFBRL8R@Arc Gallery, Chicago, IL, USA

23 February 2020

The work explored the collection of material remains of the many performances that took place at  DFBRL8R over the last 10 years. Noticing that more than  half of the collection were textile objects, I suggested looking at them through both their functional aspects and related cultural and metaphorical load. The result was a performative lecture in which I assumed a persona of a Laundry Maid - a story teller, an educator and a female domestic worker who spoke about and through the objects by interacting with them - washing, ironing, folding, wrapping - while running a slide show of stills from contemporary performance, theatre, movies and religious rituals as the lecture’s context. It was a hybrid form involving aesthetics and languages of the academic and domestic, high and low, private and public, personal and historical, artistic and mundane.

Photography and video editing: Boris Oicherman

Video: C.R. Cooper and ieke Trinks

The research for the work has been facilitated in part with the support of Rimon: The Minnesota Jewish Arts Council, an initiative of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation.

Rimon: The Minnesota Jewish Arts Council, an initiative of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation.