About 'Silent Companions': a short backstory.
A young servant glances while holding a broom in the corner of a drawing room. Benevolent twin soldiers guard the entrance wrapped in their rigid uniforms. A kitchen maid peels potatoes on her lap, and two angelic children stand next to a dusty fireplace. The laughing eyes of a milkmaid with a basket of eggs pierce us from a dark staircase.
Dummy boards or flat wooden figures, known as silent companions, were part of the 17th-century room decoration. These visual 'jokes', decorations, and markers of wealth, inhabited the interiors of aristocratic houses of the time. Painted to resemble servants, soldiers, or children, they later went out of fashion and ended up dismissed in humid gardens, exposed to the elements, and forgotten.
These objects had multi-faced and enigmatic functions. They had a few practical purposes, too, such as screening empty fireplaces during the warm season or artificially enhancing a room's dimensions due to their slightly below life-size proportions.
They ultimately created an illusory idea of presence. They might surprise unwanted visitors, such as thieves, or provide 'silent,' unquestioning companionship to their owners, much like actual servants in aristocratic houses did. Caged in their flat, inanimate bodies and amiable expressions, made of an agglomerate of fictional constructs, they speak of the commodification of proletariat bodies.
Labours of Love.
Is a domestic worker perceived as an extension of a housewife? Are women most vulnerable and deprived of self-determination within the domestic environment? The oppression of women in the family is linked to the exploitation of the working class and domestic workers are often situated at a complex intersection as they face issues in common with unpaid 'family workers'. They are thus involved with both the patriarchal family and capitalist labour market relations.
I created contemporary translations of the 17th century silent companions, engaging with the topic of female domestic labour and the condition of women within the traditional family. A series of house discards embalm or cage the workers’ bodies: as material objects they are disposable and fragmented, lacking a solid foundation, the women portrayed within are bound to the same dynamics. In this sense, the connection between the subjects and their material surroundings stands for the commodification of the women’s bodies, and more intimately refers to the personal and corporeal relationship that the subjects develop with the houses they care for, simultaneously inhabiting these spaces and being consumed by them.
