MAYDAY

BOOK OF WOMEN by Tao Aimin

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BOOK OF WOMEN NO. 1 (2006)

Chinese calligraphy on used wooden washboards, jute cord
The artist has collected thousands of washboards over the years, recording the stories and faces of the rural women whose hands wore these boards down through the recursive repetition of monotonous labor. Each board is distinct. The patterns of wear on the boards over decades of daily use are testimonies to the passage of time, the passage of the lives spent, day in and day out serving hearth and home. For many of the women who used these boards, they are among the only records left of their lives. There are often no photographs, and without literacy, there can be no diaries or letters to attest to the lives of these women. Relegated to what Hannah Arendt followed ancient Greeks in calling the oikos — the household sphere of private, bodily necessity, which they contrasted with public life, thought, action and freedom — it might seem as if these women were as invisible as their life stories. Yet the material culture of manual labor has endured for millennia, and these washboards bear witness to the infinitesimal, and yet, profound and sustaining ways in which this mundane, quotidian labor that occupied most of their existences, inscribed their beings into the world.
BOOK OF WOMEN NO. 2 (2006)

Chinese calligraphy on used wooden washboards, jute cord

Return to table of contents for PRACTICES, POWER & THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Return to table of contents for Issue 2 Winter 2010

Filed Under: Art

Further Reading

JOHNSON’S REPLY by Kent Johnson

Greetings to you over there, in the 5th or 7th arrondissement. You’d asked me some months back if I might wish to respond. I wrote you back, you’ll recall, and said I thought it best to let your review stand alone. But yesterday, the folks from MAYDAY wrote me and asked, as well, that I say something […]

TRIVIA GAME FOR A SUICIDE BOMB by Heather Kirn

“For the parents in Naariya [of Baghdad], the clocks are frozen at a quarter after ten.”  —The New York Times For a chance to move on, for a shot at the win, the answer is usually C. Which household item will stop in its tracks the moment the bomb detonates? The answer, they think, is […]

CZEŚĆ by Miriam Kotzin (translated from the English by Piotr Siwecki)

I.  Slavonic Dances Your bare feet slap against the floor. I am afraid my rooms are too small for such leaping and whirling when you fill my white spaces with suddenly bright colors and I know that not even for you can I wear again in my hair red ribbons. We are on opposite shores […]

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