By Agnes Finnie
This very interesting and sometimes shocking exhibition displays a variety of artistic media, from installations to sculptures and magazines. Its subject is the effects of work on the human body. It focuses on marginalised workers with few citizenship or employment rights. The show is organised around three workplaces: the plantation, the street, and the home.
The plantation exhibit looks at slave plantations and contemporary versions which, although not worked on by enslaved people, have few safeguards.
For example, the photographs of tea gardens in Bangladesh by Fazia Rabbi Fatiq show the injuries suffered by workers who earn £1.13 a day: an eye damaged by chemicals, a hand crushed by a machine. The workers have no right to own land.
Among the post-plantation works is a beautiful embroidery on a large mosquito net by Vivian Caccini, Mosquito Shrine, 2018. Mosquitos travelled on slave ships to Brazil in the 16th century, thriving in plantation conditions, then spreading disease across the Americas, a process made worse by deforestation.
The exhibition by Forensic Architecture, a video, sets out the many ways in which petrochemical companies in a mainly Black district of Louisiana have poisoned the earth, ruined the health of Black communities and erased traces of enslaved people’s burial grounds.
One of the most impressive works in the section on street work – selling food, collecting rubbish, cleaning streets, sex work, etc. –is a video Lxs Rifadxs de la Basura, Waste Superheroes, by Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). It features the testimonies of ‘volunteer’ rubbish collectors, both male and female, in Mexico City.
These workers are paid no wages at all and rely on tips; they are not allowed to ask for money. They have to deal with needles, and animal poo which must be separated from their ‘doggie bags’. Just watching makes the viewer so angry – but then again, there is plenty in this exhibition to be angry about.
Also in the street section is a chapel/monument to sex workers, its setting chosen because sex workers have sometimes sought refuge in churches to protest, or just to get off the streets.
The final section, the home, documents various struggles for wages for housework. This last section includes a sculpture of a Caribbean washerwoman whose hands are damaged by harsh cleaning products and decades of hard work.
One piece of work, Our Journey, 2019, documents the testimony of migrant domestic workers (in fact slaves) in the UK. The women give emotional testimonies. They are effectively kept as prisoners, paid next to nothing, spat on and physically abused, without enough time to sleep properly.
One woman was allowed to go outside for only two hours a month. Some managed to escape, one wearing pyjamas and a coat. However, when they approach the authorities they are seen as trafficked people, not as workers with rights. They are sent back to the poverty they came from, without any justice or wages.
Many important issues are raised in this exhibition, workers’ (lack of) rights being the most obvious. All migrants and asylum seekers should have the right to work in proper jobs upon arrival, to join a trade union of their choice, and to be paid the same wages as other workers.
In countries previously colonised or where slavery existed, inequalities are even more severe. Corruption and crippling international debts leave many simply eking out an existence. These debts must be cancelled as part of reparations for the exploitation and slavery by European powers. Modern-day slavery must end.
All forms of work should be recognised as labour and paid for. Bosses and governments should provide free child-care and laundry facilities, as well as good quality neighbourhood canteens so that necessary domestic labour, such as cleaning, cooking and caring, can be massively reduced.
