Dreaming Cleaning
For four years I have been an immigrant.
For four years I have been doing unqualified jobs.
For two years I have been cleaning houses, and for one year it has been my full-time job.
Eleven years ago I started university. Two degrees, three scholarships and a master’s degree have brought me here: cleaning up after others.
I was raised within a framework where education was presented as a path to stability, mobility, and progress. Today, survival depends on repetitive domestic labor. The material conditions of migration demand roles far removed from one’s academic formation and former identity.
Dreaming Cleaning explores the mental exhaustion, identity dislocation, and emotional stagnation produced by this gap between the imagined futures promised by meritocracy and the repetitive routines of domestic labor. Within a migratory context socially framed as opportunity and upward mobility, the project focuses on the less visible consequences: cognitive dissonance, suspended horizons, and the gradual erosion of one’s former life narrative.
Emerging directly from my experience as a qualified migrant working as a domestic cleaner in Australia, Dreaming Cleaning speaks to a condition shared by many others navigating similar displacements between education, labor, and survival.
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