More Than Fifty: Women’s Labor & Migration in the 21st Century

Moira Zoitl

Cha(t)ter Gardens. Stories by and about Filipina Workers
Projekt / project 2002 – 2008

Every Sunday, tens of thousands of domestic workers from South and Southeast Asia gather in the middle of Hong Kong’s renowned financial and shopping district and take possession of public space. This impressive occupation and the accompanying actions on the street surprised me, for it presents such a stark contrast to the “invisible” work of these women in private households.

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At the exhibition “Moira Zoitl, EXCHANGE SQUARE,” the artist treats the complex relationship between public and private space for migrant domestic workers by structuring one side of the exhibition space like the urban space of Hong Kong and marking the dimensions of the tiny room of the household domestic Maria Theresa Hamto on the other side of the space with wooden walls. Zoitl thus undertakes a division into public and private, while at the same time showing their mutual interpenetration.

In the first part, the gray pillars symbolize the high-rise architecture of the city and define the placement of the video monitors. Their arrangement corresponds to the spatial division of activities of the Filipino community in the urban space of Hong Kong. The pillars serve as projection surfaces in both a metaphorical and a literal sense: the videos Statue Square, Taking Pictures and Bring back HK$ 3,670! Snake Rally are projected onto one of them—these videos document the activities of the labor migrants at Statue Square; on the other side, glass panes bearing the logos of famous fashion labels and designers are leaned up against the pillars. This indicates the fact that these buildings are occupied by fashionable shops, but at the same time this is shown to be a temporary inscription and attribution. The monitors showing the migrants in public space are placed in front of these pillars close to the floor, thus alluding to the spatial position of these people in the space of Hong Kong. At the same time, viewers are forced to take a position similar to the one taken by the migrants documented in the video. Urban space is translated in the exhibition space and becomes a display of information that structures perception.

On the other side of the exhibition space, there is an installation that could be seen under the title Theresa’s Room or Street Actions5 in earlier exhibitions. Here, Zoitl combines various forms of documentation (videos, a newsletter) in a single space that is a true-to-scale reconstruction of the room of the domestic worker Maria Theresa Hamto. Visitors must enter the space to be able to see the objects. They experience the narrowness of the room and have the possibility of understanding what living there might be like. The level of purely looking at documents is complemented with the level of physical experience. In this way, a different form of perception of the visitors is addressed. At the same time, the individual representations are placed in a context that shapes the individual parts into an overall impression. The space in Theresa’s Room is marked as Hamto’s “room of her own,” and her fate and activities are set in relation to the more general social situation by the newsletter. The penetration of the private by the public and/or society becomes evident.
–Renate Wöhrer, No Room of One’s Own

THERESA’S ROOM
The installation Theresa’s Room consists of the life-sized reconstruction of the room of Maria Theresa Hamto, a Philippine domestic worker for a Chinese family in the New Territores, an outer district of Hong Kong. The embroidered bed covering The Maid’s Rulebook lists some of the rules of behavior for “housemaids,” fixed in their work contracts. The video Maria Theresa Hamto Performing Babae/Women and the Newsletter/01 with the title Street Actions (2005) document the political and social activities of migrants on the street, while Maria Theresa Hamto at Work shows the daily routine of domestic work.

Publications for download:
newsletter02.pdf

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Babae Woman, performed by Theresa Hamto.

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Moira Zoitl
*1968 in Salzburg/Austria, lives and works in Berlin
From 1990 to 1997 she studies at University of applied arts, Vienna, AT (Diploma 1995); and 1997 at University of fine arts Berlin (Visual Communications). Since 1994 she was invited to several projects and artist residencies amongst others in Budapest (1994), Rome (1998/99, Austrian federal ministry of Art), Hong Kong (2002/2004), London (2003/2009, Austrian federal ministry of Art), Bukarest (2006) and Stockholm (2007, Goethe Institute) and received i. e. in 2004 the National Award for Fine Arts (Austrian federal ministry of Art).

Moira Zoitl’s video works and installations have been shown in international exhibitions i. e. 2008 «The Third Guangzhou Triennial», Guangdong Museum of Art, China. «°I MYSELF AM WAR!», Open Space, Wien, AT. «Show Down», Projektraum exex, St. Gallen, CH. 2007 «Moira Zoitl – EXCHANGE SQUARE», Kunsthalle Exnergasse, AT. «As in real life» P74 Gallery, Ljubljana, SLO; «Sexy Mythos – Ideas and Images of Artists » (Publ), Overbeck-Gesellschaft Kunstverein Lübeck, D. 2006 «Arbeit/labour*» OBG Ormeau Bath Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland and Galerie im Taxispalais Innsbruck, AT. «Equal and less Equal» Museum on the Seam, Israel. 2005 «ongoing. feminism & activism», Galerie 5020 Salzburg, A. «REALITÄTEN I: Machtfaktor Wirtschaft», Fotogalerie Wien, A