There was no way things could get messed up. A harmonious order, centred on cultivated Man, a rational being who guaranteed that the universe would run like clockwork. A soul brought to perfection by education, contemplation and action ruled over the flesh, keeping it from slumping into its animal nature. Religion promised beatitude to those who led a just life.
But cracks had been splitting open for a long time. There were attempts to put the pieces back together after each bloody convulsion, but technological “progress” continued to rend the protective fabric. Then protests from the outside began to be heard. Why can’t we women, too, warm ourselves in your greenhouse of sovereignty, gentlemen? Why are we colonised people not entitled to your dignity?
Recriminations broke out all around. Likewise, advocates for the animals, plants, forests, rivers and oceans, all mistreated by human exceptionalism, demanded an end to domination. Inside the tattered greenhouse, some could not accept the decentring and accusations. Instead of stitching it up once again, they decided that the greenhouse had become a hindrance and had to be burned down. They began building high walls to re-establish borders and constructing spaceships to escape.
The daily drudgery of woman’s work is the throughline in the videos of the German artist Margaret Raspé, who died last November at the age of ninety. Finding herself the sole caregiver for her three children after a divorce in the 1970s, Raspé dealt with the fact that housework left her no time for making art by attaching a Super-8 camera to a construction hardhat so that she could film her daily hustle and bustle. Augmented by this prosthetic device, she won her emancipation as an artist and a woman, able to expose and transcend her condition as a “Frautomat” (automated housewife), a term she coined to describe a lifetime circumscribed by the mechanical and repetitive daily tasks necessary for human sustenance, such as, for example, whipping cream, doing the dishes or slitting a chicken’s throat and cooking it. Although she never explicitly associated herself with the women’s movement, her artistic practice during this period can be read in light of the critical thinking of materialist feminism, with its denunciation of the double exploitation of women, in the workplace and through their unpaid domestic labour.
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Image credits: Margaret Raspé in L'effet de serre, Abatialle de Bellelay, 2024, installation view. Photo: Sebastian Verdon.