Summary

At the invitation of Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, I created the spatial installation Invisible Hands. A tribute to Schiedam's home carers, consisting of common interior objects made of eraser. The material symbolises the removal of the unwanted, just as less and less remains of home care (domestic help) as an invisible part of society.

Info

Invisible Hands. A tribute to Schiedam’s home carers started with the request from Stedelijk Museum Schiedam to create a new work connected to Schiedam. After an entire summer of working as a temporary home carer, I opted to reveal a side of the city that often remains unseen.

While working as a home carer, I kept a record of my experiences – without mentioning names – in a logbook describing how I had performed the household tasks I had taken on with a great sense of responsibility. Yet at the same time, I experienced feelings of helplessness, loneliness and dejection; discovering how impersonal the work often is. At times, the physical and emotional conditions in which I found my clients were shocking. The logbook affords the visitor a glimpse into a remarkable parallel world – a world that often remains largely unseen by the general public until they too find themselves in need of home care. This also prompted me to reflect on my mother’s life. After we fled Afghanistan with our family and arrived in the Netherlands, my mother found work as a domestic care worker. The exhibition featured recordings of conversations I had with my mother, in which we explored her experiences during this period of her life, and how they were akin to the legacy of home carers that often are unseen and uncared for.

For the exhibition, Merel van der Vaart (city history curator) and I delved into the history of Schiedam and in the stories of many women who preceded my mother and me in the cleaning profession (back then, there was no word for domestic help). Several nineteenth-century portrait photographs found in the City Archive depict servants or ‘maidservants for day and night’. It was a precarious occupation because it was done behind closed doors and it was often a solitary undertaking. Even when legislation was introduced to provide better protection for workers, it did not apply to this type of work. The government was reluctant to interfere in the affairs of the family structure. Very little information about Schiedam’s servants can be found in the archives – as though their lives and stories have been erased from history.

Invisible Hands. A tribute to Schiedam’s home carers was on display in one of the two attic rooms at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam. A spatial installation depicted an alcove from the interior of a small house where all kinds of objects were arranged; things we use every day but easily overlook while cleaning, i.e. shampoo bottles, doors and door handles, power sockets and light switches. These objects are made out of synthetic silicone that was kneaded into a dough and shaped within 5 to 7 minutes until it completely hardened. For me, this material symbolises the removal of the unwanted. An eraser simultaneously eliminates while gradually disappears itself. Just like the cleaner, an invisible member of society, of whom less and less remains as a result of the incessant cycle. Despite painstaking effort and rigorous cleaning, it takes only a few minutes for the work to be undone.

Many thanks to

Metalwork, assistance and advice: Dennis Slootweg

Printing house: Maarten Schenkeveldt, Marcel Kerkmans
Graphic design: Lukas Engelhardt, Justus Gelberg
Text editing: Rik Dijkhuizen
Sound editing: Rick Haring
DTP: Wouter van Meel

Photography press release: Marysia Swietlicka
Photography exhibition + documentation: Io Sivertsen
Photography opening event: Lizzy Zaanen

Archival research: Merel van der Vaart, Thijs Waltman
Advice: Lidwien Meijer, Hugo Boogaard

Made possible by

Gemeente Schiedam
Mondriaan Fonds
Stedelijk Museum Schiedam
Stroom Den Haag