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Keeping the House: Memory, Futility, Labor
B.Arch. Thesis
May 2025
The practice of domestic cleaning is one that binds notions of memory, futility, and labor. It also carries close associations with the medium of the textile, both as a tool for cleaning and a thing to be cleaned in and of itself. Memory is sustained, in part, through physical traces and “ghosts” of some event, and in cleaning, the cloth often carries these traces. The three-dimensional body of the cloth allows it to absorb and hold foreign matter; simultaneously, its fibrous makeup allows it to shed parts of itself without coming apart completely.
Traces can be direct or indirect. Direct traces might be stains, impressions, or folds that result from the event itself. Indirect traces are those that result from the labor that succeeds the event; the fiber damage that results from laundry fits into this category.
Labor, here, is the reaction to memory. It is the physical effort in service of restoring (remembering, reenacting) some previous state or forgetting some undesirable event. Sometimes, it seeks to do achieve both of these objectives; the results vary. These efforts to remember or forget are inevitably futile. Domestic cleaning endeavors to restore “like new”-ness and erase, undo, or render inert any blemish, but in reality, it usually leaves its own traces. In removing a stain, for instance, one damages the fiber, effectively trading one type (and scale) of evidence for another. Because the stain is more visible to the naked eye, its erasure is prioritized over the preservation of the fiber. Human sensory perception, primarily through sight, thus sets the parameters of scale and the hierarchy of objectives.
There emerges, thus, a linear trajectory of material degradation through the cyclical rhythm of use, restoration, use, restoration—each stage leaving something behind in the cloth. The ideal product of cleaning, of course, is not this linear trajectory, but rather a kind of perfect circle, where the starting state and the ending state are indistinguishable from each other.
The impossibility of this pursuit reveals this futility and absurdity. The practices of soaking, scrubbing, wringing, and rinsing become almost tragicomic; all that time and sweat, and what does one have to show for it? Is it the absence of matter? The absence of dirt, stain, evidence?