film | sound | performance   

                                                         



essays


2    Between City and Self


ghida anouti
about
contact

Massachusetts Institute of Technology * Spring 2024

Traveling Laundry Line




Collaborators: Juan Manuel Chavez & Hajar Alrifai
Exhibition Spaces: MIT Museum & MIT ACT Gallery
Duration * 00:14:12
Advised by Nida Sinnokrot







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 Il, 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.