All in a Day’s Work, a listening lounge curated by Andrea Zarza at Rhubaba Gallery (27 July – August 18, 2018), invites visitors to engage with curated playlists of archival and contemporary sound recordings that explore ‘labours of love’, such as artistic, affective and domestic labour.
Organised into five different sub-themes – All four(s), Stooping, Hands on the Machine, Cradling and Lying down, Looking up – the visitors are invited to take a specific position to listen, a position associated with the labours described in each sub-theme. This embodied listening asks one to put themselves in the position of the other so as to more empathetically connect with the voices and songs in the recordings.
All four(s) relates to ‘labours of love’ implicit within the structure of the nuclear family, typically associated with the number four – the mother, the father, and two children; it asks us to get down on ‘all fours’, a position that alludes to the cleaning of floors and sexual exploitation; Cradling finds its focus in lullabies, the work song par excellence of female affective and emotional labour; Stooping explores women’s roles in traditional labour; in Hands on the Machine, sound recordings reveal the relationship between women and skilled, machine-led labour: from waulking cloth to computer music; finally, Lying down, Looking up invites the listener to pause and reflect, to look up into the open possibilities of different futures.
Exhibition Page