Throughout my family history, all the women I can remember worked as domestic workers. Cleaning was always present for me as the standard through which judgments of value were made. Intuitively, I understood that society was divided between those who clean and those who dirty, between those who are clean and those who are eternally dirty. Our district, Villa El Salvador, belongs to those places whose shoes and bodies would be eternally full of dust, evidently due to its geographical and developmental conditions.

What do cleaners clean? is a project carried out in collaboration with my mother. Along with many other domestic workers, after the Covid-19 pandemic in Peru, my mother was arbitrarily dismissed without any state regulation or protection. Through the budget I obtained from the Pasaporte 2020 grant, I hired my mother with a minimum wage to carry out this project. What do cleaners clean? consisted of exhaustively and obsessively cleaning a vacant lot in Villa El Salvador: cleaning what is eternally dirty, removing dust from dust itself, an impossible task. She and I, as we had agreed together, went out dressed in domestic workers’ uniforms for one month, eight hours a day, to carry out this task. We began our labor on August 25 and concluded on September 23, 2020.

This action seeks to make public a problem that seems to belong exclusively to the private sphere. The most discredited, invisibilized, and dehumanized forms of labor are those related to cleaning, both private and public. Through the excuse of private health, we have perpetuated situations of oppression and inequality on different scales.