Musings

WASHING UP Stephanie Guest

Photography by Lisa Sorgini

Encrusted with food, our breakfast bowl waits to be washed. Smears on small faces call out to be wiped. More snacks, endless snacks, are demanded—we’re still hungry. Dresses soiled with strawberries and snot.

We shipped our rolled-rim from Melbourne to Stuttgart. It journeyed in a giant container for seven months. Unlike one of our chairs, which snapped in half during the trip, the bowl emerged from the boxes un-chipped.

Before our things arrived, we lived at a university guest house where we shared a communal kitchen with graduate students. The bowls were a motley collection, jumbled in the grimy cupboard. A sign on the dishwasher said: FOR STAFF USE ONLY. Because my husband was beginning a job rather than a degree, I justified—to myself—filling up the machine with the bowls we had used. The next morning, as I was unpacking clean dishes, the housekeeper rushed in to chide me, NEIN NEIN NEIN. Our habits in the kitchen were closely monitored for the two months it took to find our own place. We scrubbed our eating implements by hand. Because the single supplied tea towel was always already greasy with the residue of someone else’s meal, we left our things to air-dry. Overnight, a dusty laminated sign had been placed on top of the pile, with a passive-aggressive message about collective tidiness. We started to sneak crockery into the dishwasher late at night, waking early to unpack it before the housekeeper’s shift began.

My mother and I visited an exhibition of feminist avant-garde photography at Stuttgart’s Staatsgalerie. An image of a woman ironing the smooth marble floor of an institutional corridor stages housework as absurd performance art in grainy black and white.

Since moving to Germany, I have not met any full-time working mothers. In the state of Baden-Württemberg, there are tax benefits for families where one parent earns significantly more than the other. School ends at midday; our kindergarten closes at two o’clock. Since quitting my job of many years—in search of a new one—I have found myself drawn into housework, prioritising it. I am satisfied by the way simple tasks transform the domestic sphere; I am suffocated by the neverending cycle. There are always more dishes, more clothes to wash.

Our beloved bowl occupies our sparsely furnished apartment as a totem, of sorts. Of friendship, of home, of creative pursuit. Sometimes it contains garlic, lemons, avocados. Sometimes it is yet another thing to clean. It fits nicely in our dishwasher, which I use with impunity.

STEPHANIE GUEST is a writer and architecture graduate, born on Wurundjeri land and living in Stuttgart. She is the mother of two daughters, aged 8 and 3. As one half of the architecture x literature exchange GUEST, RIGGS, Stephanie explores the architecture of parenthood, with work exhibited by MPavilion, RMIT Design Hub and NGV Design Week, and published by Thames & Hudson, The Architecture Foundation, Melbourne Open House, and The Lifted Brow. She was Aesop’s Architectural Copywriter for seven years.

LISA SORGINI is an Australian–Italian artist living on Bundjalung Land. Her work explores themes of motherhood, memory, and care through the medium of still photography. Sorgini’s intimate, painterly images draw on personal experience and cultural research to reflect the unseen labour of domestic life. Her work has been exhibited internationally and featured in The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, The New York Times, and The Guardian.