Reclaimed Domestic

The kitchen is where domestic work has progressively lost its economic value and become instead a labor of love, as Silvia Federici names it. But domestic work has also lost value outside of the kitchen. Reclaimed Domestic expands upon Peruvian comedores to include spaces of both communal cooking and communal domestic work.

In the absence of parents who work out of the home, domestic labor in poor neighborhoods falls on young daughters, who must cook, clean, wash clothes and care for their siblings. By age 12, only 2.3% of these girls who labor as domestic workers are able to attend school because of the time spent on chores. Reclaimed Domestic is a domestic labor infrastructure that acts as a bridge between the urban educational system and the existing comedores system.

It is only by taking the domestic work out of house that it can be redistributed and performed by others and begin to tackle biases. By expanding upon the comedores we take domestic work into the urban realm, making it visible and communal. By attaching spaces for education we not only alleviate some of the burden from these girls, we also give them time to participate in education.

Domestic life begins to spill out of the home, furniture is moved, domesticity is mimicked and the public space becomes reclaimed by this infrastructure. Reclaimed Domestic imagines a new typology of community in which different parts of the population collectivize reproductive labor. Reproductive work is no longer an oppressive, discriminating activity but a liberating and creative one that enables experimentation in human and urban relations.