Domestic Worker's & Performing Migrant Women's Labor in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

Submitted by CRG on Thu, Sep 17, 2009 - 6:33 pm – No comments

Charlotte McIvor from Berkeley's Performance Studies examines art practice as a mode of intercultural engagement and anti-racist work in Ireland through the “Opening Doors” project, which combined work on a quilt showing the experience of domestic workers in Ireland, a collaborative photography project depicting scenes from domestic work with artist Susan Gogan, and independent photography captured by the women. How should art practice in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland be situated as part of the “process” of social and structural change that works to get to the “root causes of poverty, inequality, and exclusion” ? How does the practice of controlling “representation” and “staging images” of labor as “art” open up performance and arts practice as modes of resistance for migrant communities in Ireland today, while also indexing the power relations that give them access to these avenues? Do art and activism have to be mutually exclusive in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland today, or can they ever work together separate from the discipline of the “Irish racist state”?

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Charlotte McIvor from Berkeley's Performance Studies examines art practice as a mode of intercultural engagement and anti-racist work in Ireland through the “Opening Doors” project, which combined work on a quilt showing the experience of domestic workers in Ireland, a collaborative photography project depicting scenes from domestic work with artist Susan Gogan, and independent photography captured by the women.