FORENSIC LAUNDRY

The ladies' toilet: a place for intimacy, a shelter from a very bad day, for crying and to not be seen. It is the same place where many times Nora, as well as her female colleagues, has had to wash up a spot from her blouse. This space is transformed into a laundry that the invisible woman uses to wash her clothes up.

This is not a conventional laundry, the invisible woman as any criminal forensic scientist would, tries to remove any fingerprints of her past. She uses the act of washing as a way to remove the discriminatory stereotype of womanhood. It is a rejection of the traditional myth of the Eternal Feminine, the object of male fantasy, the middle-class myth of love and marriage, as the dominant image of femininity which rules our culture and to which most women aspire.

The forensic laundry is created by repetition, a frozen and over-lapped sequence. By blow drying one garment after another the invisible woman generates a space where the same object and task are duplicated with each new wash. The toilet seat becomes the washboard, the wash hand basins to rinse the soap off, the hidden pipes are revealed, structuring the space and, at the same time, helping her wring out the clothes. Finally the hand dryers finish off the operation of evidence removal which is hidden in the soap foam.