Mulher a dias, 2018

Domestic work: housewives/ housekeeping

The connection of ceramics with the feminine (and feminism) is not only in office production and craft or artistic creation, but also through its daily use. Transport, containment of liquids or solids, containers, adornments, utensils,… – a utilitarian sense always linked to what is now called the “domestic”, to all this invisible work that has always been fulfilled and ensured almost exclusively by women.

The inequality and gender asymmetry is especially visible in the distribution of domestic tasks, where “on weekdays, women spend an average of 4 hours and 23 minutes doing unpaid work [household chores], that is 1 hour and 45 minutes more than men. The trend is reinforced during weekends”. On average, the difference between men’s and women’s weekly time spent on household chores is 12 hours 22 minutes.

In “The use of time by men and women in Portugal” is also referred to this non-historical figure (for repeated shaving and invisibilization, not because it is a recent creation) that is the “maid” – read “woman-days”, “lady of cleaning”, among other colloquial and sexist expressions used to call the person who performs household chores in the home of others, a workplace occupied by 80% women. The authors affirm that hiring a person to perform domestic services can create a situation of greater balance in relation to the distribution of tasks, but repeatedly emphasize that this does not solve the gender issues and to rethink the social notions of it, only eliminate the need and urgency of change of this behavior associated with the male: “Ruth Lister (…) says that ‘buying another woman’s time’ (poorer women and often immigrants), instead of idealizing the sexual division of domestic work, ends up reinforcing male behavior.

Bringing the private to public, Rita GT equips herself with her jumpsuit, identified as “mulher-a-dias”, and carries all the dirty dishes left for “someone” to wash. Looking directly at the camera, facing the passive observer, eliminates the invisibility of its place by direct confrontation. This photograph is part of a series of 9, entitled “Mulher-a-Dias”, a series developed during the residence of Rita GT in Golborne Street, London, a street where a large Portuguese community lives, who fled to England at the time of the Estado Novo and the Colonial War – and was subsequently presented in the exhibition “Escola ao lado / School Next Door” at Galeria 50 Golborne (March 2018). It is an incisive and important work in the context of the migration that marked this era: little or nothing literate, women who moved to London (and other places) were limited in their professional possibilities, becoming cleaning maids in hotels or in middle and upper class houses, invisible and invisible in their work and human condition. Just as pottery was a “minor art”, these women also performed the “minor works”.

Extremely coherent and consistent, the work of Rita GT is never exhausted in itself, as the subjects it deals with are not exhausted, nor does it fall into the temptation of repetition even when it returns to them, because this returnthe constant renewal both aesthetic and of the way to face and respond to problems that also they are updated and repeated.

​Marta Espiridião, 2019