Galindo, Regina Jose. Angelina. 2001, http://www.reginajosegalindo.com/angelina/
In Guatemala, domestic labor is overwhelmingly performed by poor indigenous women. In this durational performance, Guatemalan artist Regina Jose Galindo wears traditional sirvienta (maid) clothes for a month as she goes about her daily routine. This is a piece that considers clothing as performance and engages with everyday life as performance. Its photographic documentation shows Galindo in different settings: a religious procession, a food and clothes market, an ATM, a restaurant, a bar, working in front of a computer. Some of these images seem “natural” while others jump out at the audience’s eyes as disonnant, revealing the classed and racialized character of certain activities and environments. In a later interview with Bomb Magazine, Regina Jose Galindo's reminisces about the emotional work that this act of “passing (down)” and domestic work more broadly require: “You aren’t worth a thing, and so they look down on you, and you go around with your shoulders always slumped, and they speak to you always with that disparaging tone in their voice. They barely deign to notice you, they won’t let you into many places, and when they do let you enter, they stare at you disdainfully.”
A tangent (?): In the quote above, Galindo mentions the bodily effects of what begins as a sartorial performance and then is embodied in more than one way. Her “always slumped” shoulders illustrate a form transfer from clothes to skin and the cost of racialized feminization that comes with certain occupations.
See Angelina’s photo-documentation here.