Collaborators: Ghida Anouti and Hajar Alrifai
14:12
Installation at the ACT Gallery (MIT List Visual Arts Center)
2024 (on view from May 22-June 5)
Hajar Alrifai
Ghida Anouti
Juan M. Chávez
Our garments live an endless cycle of renewal, washing away, healing and mending, masking and forgetting. Laundering is laden with sociopolitical meaning and deeply rooted in domesticity and women’s labor. In the United States, post World War II, garment care rituals were exported from the home and conveniently repackaged for consumers at laundromats with coin-operated machines. However, the laundromat is not only a site of economic exchange; to many immigrant communities, it is a means of survival and placemaking. The community aspect of the laundromat evokes some memories of the riverbank, where the act of laundering clothes was a collective gathering of hands and voices. The act of washing clothes is steeped in distant memories of home, of our mothers, of the riverbank. Perhaps the laundry machine: both witness to and accomplice in the act of forgetting, also yearns to be elsewhere, to remember. In Traveling Laundry Line, a lonely immigrant embarks on a melancholic journey home through a time-traveling laundry machine.