Still dealing with daily chores (2021)

“Still dealing with daily chores”, Video, animation and sound, 2021

This video conveys the feeling of never-ending tasks and getting overwhelmed by repeating patterns amplified by being housebound due to my health issues. As a patient struggling to get proper attention and diagnosis I feel close to this character wandering aimlessly.

It also depicts the slow evolution of gender roles despite of the rapid modernization and various feminist movements globally.

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

Simone de Beauvoir

Feminist activist Muriel Fox quotes Gloria Steinem in a discussion about the origins of the modern women’s movement: “It’s taken us 40 years to demonstrate that women can do what men do, now its time to demonstrate that men can do what women can do.” (Source: https://youtu.be/GjVoqZJc5mY at 1:15:45)