HOW TO WAIT FOR YOUR LAUNDRY
a guidance in waiting
Doing laundry has forever been degraded to a meaningless, undervalued and unproductive task. What once was a collective get together nowadays has become a solitary act.
I’ve visited 15 laundromats in different neighborhoods in Copenhagen to start doing this household work together with others. In each laundromat I approached another female and asked her: “do you want to wait together?”.
While waiting for our laundry cycles to finish, we talked, schemed, plotted and complained about what is going on in our lives. We turned our unproductive waiting time into something meaningful and political.
We spoke about feminism, the female body, self-worth, Audre Lorde, the pay-gap, patriarchy, how we were raised as girls, how to negotiate about money, how we lost our jobs and how we are still not able to financially support ourselves without a partner.
While folding our laundry together we exchanged political views, compared our national governments, discussed capitalism and the sacrificing of bodies to save the economy during corona.
When we finished our labour we would sometimes exchange contacts and other times simply thank each other and both go our separate ways.
In each laundromat I left behind a guidance in waiting as a proposal for fellow washers.
The guidances are in A4 format and designed to fully blend in with the notes already present in the laundromat to not draw the attention of the owner. You can find it stuck it on the walls, on the folding tables or on the washing machines.
The guidance in waiting can be applied to all sorts of waiting situations.
