Project: "Who's Doing The Washing Up?"

Curator: Eva Rowson (Lighthouse Curator in Residence, 2019)

Year: 2019

Produced and organised by Lighthouse.

Part of: Re-Imagine Europe

Outcome: live events, workshops, interventions, commissions, podcasts, as well as re-imaginings of the uses and workings of the Lighthouse building itself


Read Eva's curatorial reflections here: Who is doing the washing up? Report

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Lighthouse's 2019 Curator in Residence, Eva Rowson, developed a programme for Re-Imagine Europe, a four-year project with ten European cultural organisations to imagine radical approaches to developing new audiences and ways of working. Eva invited artists to develop projects in response to these ambitions, thinking about alternative organisational models, ways of communicating and forms of hospitality – taking root in the Lighthouse building and its local networks.

The project is also a response to Lighthouse’s aim to create spaces to host new ideas, practices and communities and a shared understanding amongst local groups and independent organisations that these spaces are disappearing elsewhere in the city.

Eva's programme for Lighthouse was a continuation from a series of artist commissions developed at Bergen Kunsthall (Norway) in 2018 – the Norwegian partner for Re-Imagine Europe – under the title ’Who’s doing the washing up – and where’s the sink?‘. The title was used to address questions that so often go unasked by institutions and grant-makers when imagining ’radical’ new models: Who gets to have a voice in these re-imaginings? How are different types of work – from the artists to the cleaning – valued in future organisations? And how do we actually change the infrastructures we’re working in so we don’t just reproduce the same models, narratives and values?

Artists Jordi Ferreiro, Aliyah Hussain, Anna Bunting-Branch, Maia Urstad and Anton Kats – alongside new commissions – continued their lines of research drawing on experimental education movements, feminist science-fiction, radio and constructed languages. These were developed through different forms including workshops, interventions and re-imaginings of the uses and workings of the Lighthouse building itself.

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Eva Rowson (UK/NO) is curator of Landmark, Bergen Kunsthall. She questions how we host each other, how we work together, and how we build organisations – as well as the labour and structures that support these processes. This thinking is at the core of long-term collaborative projects including the project space 38b, co-run from her living room in London and Como imaginar una musea?, an evolving Catalan-Spanish-English project that reimagines the apparatus of the ‘museo’ (a masculine noun in Spanish) through a feminist approach based on principles of care, hospitality and collaboration. She has worked in organisations like The Showroom, TATE, and Matt’s Gallery and the 2016 Bergen Assembly.

'Who's Doing The Washing Up?' is part of Re-imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.