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 grew up within a meritocratic discourse, “if you study, if you work hard, you will go far.” However, today I clean houses in order to make a living.
Years of study translate into an empty qualification, with no effective correspondence in the labor market. The distance between expectations, accumulated cultural capital, and professional reality exposes a structural mismatch between education, work, and survival.
Dreaming Cleaning examines 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.
Operating from my experience as a qualified migrant in Australia, Dreaming Cleaning reflects a broader generational condition marked by the growing disconnection between education, labor markets, and economic survival.
The project does not seek a resolution, but rather to register the exact point where critique and necessity coexist within the same body.