Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights

This silent video was produced in the kampungs of Jakarta, Indonesia. Kampungs are neighbourhoods occupied by newly arrived migrants in which small, informal cooperatives are set up to provide basic necessities, including housing, education and work.

The film concentrates on the rhythmic repetition of the migrant workers’ hand gestures, showing the body as the predominant machine in the production of everyday objects.

Bouba Touré (1948 – 2022) was a Franco-Malian film projectionist, photographer, writer and farmer. He documented the everyday lives of migrants and migrant workers’ movements, such as les sans-papiers (without papers) in Paris. These photographs show street gatherings of citizens from France’s former colonial territories fighting for freedom of movement. Touré honours the migrant-led movements that led to the improvement of workers’ rights and the recognition of thousands of undocumented migrants despite the ongoing rise of hostile immigration laws in France.

Following the Second World War, thousands of people from Commonwealth countries in the Caribbean were asked by the British government to relocate to the UK to help with labour shortages. They are often referred to as the Windrush generation, after the ship HMT Empire Windrush on which the first group arrived in 1948. They have made a fundamental contribution to key British infrastructure, with many working as bus drivers, sanitation workers, cleaners and nurses in the National Health Service.

This book shows how Western medicine was used to sustain plantation economies by justifying the importance of slavery in the West Indies. Dr Collins wrote that plantation owners should view medical treatment for enslaved people as an investment. Keeping the workforce ‘healthy’ would lead to an increase in productivity and wealth. The book includes treatments for various infectious diseases, such as yaws and pox, as well as instructions on the management of enslaved people’s housing, food and labour, demonstrating the extreme level of control over their lives.

The Brazilian photographer Marc Ferrez (1843– 1923) documented the rapid transformation of Brazil’s modern urban development and landscapes. He focused on the coffee fazenda, or plantation, that was responsible for the growth of the Brazilian Empire’s wealth in the early 19th century. Fazendas were highly profitable due to their fast production, ideal weather conditions and the rise of migrant labour in the country. This photograph was commissioned by the plantation owner and the Centre for Farming and Commerce to promote coffee production in international exhibitions. The violence of slavery is concealed in this calm scene depicting discipline, order, power and wealth on the plantation.

This print, from a series of 12, shows tea plantation work in China. Each print depicts different steps in the production of tea, including sowing, cultivation, drying and its exportation from China to Europe. This scene outlines the power dynamics involved in how the work was performed. The authoritarian, symmetrical space reflects the hierarchical relationship between workers’ occupations. These are ordered according to their position, clothing and the striking difference in the physical endurance required for each job.

Tea gardens were created in the Bangladeshi region of Sylhet in 1854 by British merchants. People from different parts of India migrated to the region with the promise of decent work. Today, workers do not have the right to own land and most work informally, earning an average daily wage of US $1.42 (£1.13). The beautiful landscape conceals the harsh and unsafe working conditions for tea workers. Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq’s photographs reveal a worker’s hand crushed by a machine for processing tea leaves and an eye injured by harmful pesticides.

German naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647 –  1717) researched the rich fauna and flora in Suriname, a former Dutch colony on the northeast coast of South America. She produced one of the first and most compelling botanicals made by a woman. It includes over 60 colour drawings of plants and their interdependent ecosystem of insects and animals. Merian’s descriptions of each plant’s properties and usage was heavily influenced by the knowledge of the enslaved women she was introduced to by the owner of a sugar plantation.

This page shows the Caesalpinia pulcherrima, also known as the peacock flower, used by enslaved women to abort unwanted pregnancies and resist bearing a child that would be born into enslavement.

Maria Floriza Veríssimo is a quilombola who lives in the Quilombo Ausente in the Municipality of Serro in Minas Gerais, in Brazil. Quilombos are settlements created by enslaved Indigenous and African people who escaped the plantation system that date as far back as 400 years ago. Hundreds of quilombos still exist and continue to be inhabited by enslaved people’s descendants and other low-income families. This installation presents 12 pages of her notebook about plants that grow in a communal creole garden by her home. The garden has sustained and nourished generations in their quest for liberation. Quilombos are a symbol of resistance, healing and autonomy, sustaining new structures of work and life away from the inhumanity of forced labour.

This painting is one in a series of panel paintings by Jacob Lawrence (1917 – 2000) that tells the story of abolitionist Harriet Tubman (1822 – 1913). Tubman founded the Underground Railroad, a fragile network of safe houses along the routes that allowed thousands of enslaved people to escape from Southern plantations to the Northern states of the USA. Plants found in the landscapes were fundamental during the escapes. Here, Tubman is pictured resting. She holds a rifle, lying on the hard ground beside a couple and their baby. The hard lines delineating her toes and muscles emphasise the arduous journeys she has made.

Maria Auxiliadora da Silva (1935 – 74) depicted the everyday lives of Afro-Brazilians. This painting represents the Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda, comprised of a combination of Spiritism, Shamanism, Catholicism and African religions. Enslaved people converted Catholic saints to their own pantheon of gods named orixás. At the rear of the temple, images of Saint Sebastian, the orixá of the forests and hunting, and Saint Lazarus, the orixá of health and healing, conceal the African and Indigenous traditions of Umbanda. Afro-Brazilian religions are, and continue to be, persecuted by the state. These hidden references protect their existence.

This song narrates the harsh treatment of enslaved people on a plantation in a direct message to their owners. It was transcribed by British abolitionist Granville Sharp (1735 – 1813) based on information from Scottish abolitionist Dr William Dickson (1751 – 1823), who heard the song while in Barbados. Storytelling through collective singing was an act of survival. Though forbidden to talk while working, enslaved people were permitted to sing in unison, as it was deemed productive by plantation owners and supervisors. Using rhythm and voice, songs contained coded meanings that preserved and shared knowledge and culture from generation to generation.

Along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans in the US state of Louisiana, a heavily industrialised ‘Petrochemical Corridor’ overlays a territory formerly known as ‘Plantation Country’. In the region’s majority-Black communities, residents – descendants of people historically enslaved on the same land – breathe some of the most toxic air in the country and suffer one of the highest risks of cancer and other serious health conditions, yielding the regional name ‘Death Alley’. As industrial development pollutes their air, it also threatens the burial grounds of their ancestors, exposing the continuum of environmental racism in the region. This project seeks to offer new tools to local residents and their allies to protect their history and future from industrial erasure, and to support their vision of a new cultural economy that honours the dead and uplifts the living.

Credits: Forensic Architecture Team

Project Coordinators: Imani Jacqueline Brown, Samaneh Moafi, Eyal Weizman

Project Supervision: Dimitra Andritsou, Olukoye Akinkugbe, Omar Ferwati, Ariel Caine, Kishan San, Nicholas Masterton, Nour Abuzaid, Sanjana Varghese, Ayana Enomoto-Hurst, Ana Lopez Sanchez-Vegazo, Caterina Selva, Jacob Bertilsson, Sam Blair, Robert Trafford, Elizabeth Breiner, Sarah Nankivell

Extended Team: Dr Salvador Navarro-Martinez (Imperial College London)

Collaborators: Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), The Descendants Project, Earthworks, Healthy Gulf, Imperial College London, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, The Human Rights Advocacy Project (HRAP), Loyola New Orleans College of Law, The Ethel and Herman L Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies, Louisiana Museum of African American History, Whitney Plantation Museum

In partnership with RISE St James

Thanks to: Sharon Lavigne, August “AJ” Gomez, Milton Cayette, Chasity White, Jo Banner, Joy Banner, Jordan Brewington, Leon A Waters, Don Hunter, D Ryan Gray, Devin Ngetich, Mary N Mitchell, Ludovico Palmeri, Bryan C Lee, Jr, Jeremy Blum, Tammie Mills, Alahna Moore, Stephanie Cooper

In her work, Vivian Caccuri focuses on the figure of the mosquito, an insect that carries deadly infectious diseases. In the 16th century the mosquito was transported on slave ships from Africa to Brazil and has since spread across the Americas. In this embroidered work, mosquitoes take on a human scale, thriving in the human-made plantation landscape. In Brazil today, rapid deforestation has led to the return of yellow fever. Here, Caccuri invites us to reconsider our relationship with the mosquito, as an insect also affected by histories of colonialism.

In the 19th century, the American model of the separate system was introduced to Britain and informed the construction of the HM Prison Pentonville, built in 1842 in Islington, London.
It was initially built with a capacity of 520 isolated cells. Communal spaces such as exercise courtyards and chapels were also separated to discourage social contact among prisoners, causing high rates of depression. Today, Pentonville is overcrowded, with over 1,200 prisoners.

The treadwheel was originally used to generate power for pumping water or manufacturing. In the 19th century it was used as a method of punishment, discipline and unnecessary productivity. This controversial tool enabled prison governors to set daily productivity targets for the number of steps per prisoner per hour. The slide rule encouraged prison authorities to adopt a more uniform system of treadwheel use, as the severity of labour practices varied greatly between prisons.

This work is part of long-term research by prison activist and artist Sheila Pinkel, denouncing the growth of the mass incarceration system in the USA. In 2001, Pinkel found a catalogue of items made by prisoners in California prisons, ranging from utilitarian objects to office furniture. In some US states, universities and government offices are required by law to purchase equipment produced by low-paid prison workers. The work shows the proximity of prison labour to everyday life.

Sara Bennett is a former public defender who photographs women with life sentences to draw attention to the problems of mass incarceration in the USA, where over 200,000 people are serving life sentences. The women – all convicted of homicide – are documented at their place of work in prison. Sara Bennett asked the women, “What do you want to say to the outside world?” The portraits and accompanying words reveal the women’s experience and humanity, and challenge the viewer to think about the laws and policies that lock people up, sometimes for ever.

Chance Bleu-Montgomery was formerly incarcerated in London. In this recording, he narrates his personal journey of growth, inspired by his experience inside and outside of prison. He describes how he improved his and his peers’ living conditions, from cooking nutritious meals with very little, using DIY homeware, sharing recipes for food and drinks, to inventing ways of communicating while isolated in a cell. He describes how ingenuity and innovation can manifest themselves in the toughest moments in life. This motto has inspired his work as a social changemaker today.

Drawn on medicine packets, these three drawings express the importance of meditative art-making to relieve Ibrahim El-Salahi’s chronic pain caused by sciatica and Parkinson’s disease. In 1975, he spent six months and eight days as a political prisoner at the Kober prison in Khartoum, Sudan, which holds colonial ties to Britain. While in prison, he drew on the paper bags that wrapped the food his family brought him. Drawing put him at risk of punishment or execution, but was an essential way for him to survive the isolation of imprisonment and ease his mental and physical chronic pain.

These recent drawings reference those El-Salahi made during his time in prison, and feature recurring symbols from his practice: a bird and tree that represent freedom, rebirth, personal growth and peace, coupled with Sufi spirituality.

‘Street Life in London’ is an early example of social documentary photography. The aim of the book was “to bring before the public some account of the present condition of the London street folk, and to supply a series of faithful pictures of the people themselves”. The subjects include flower sellers, chimney sweeps, dustmen and locksmiths, as well as street doctors and public disinfectors.

The tragic deaths of Echol Cole and Robert Walker, who were crushed to death by a garbage truck while at work, sparked this historical strike in Memphis in the USA. Black sanitation workers weren’t allowed to join unions and suffered from poor treatment and unequal pay in contrast to their white counterparts. The placard held by the strikers became a symbol of dignity, freedom and resistance. The strike resulted in an agreement for the city to improve its working conditions.

Sweeping was a daily artistic performance that Vikram Divecha developed with five migrant sweepers in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Their daily routes were replotted so that they deposited a row of green rubbish-filled bags in front of the Sharjah Art Museum during their working hours. It drew attention to the dirt and the labour involved in sanitation work, while recognising the vital contributions of overlooked workers.

This map is made on a photocopy of the sector map of the Al Shuweihean neighbourhood, which surrounds the museum. Using a different coloured pen to represent each sweeper, the drawings trace the remapped routes. The images document the performance while highlighting their repetitive and low-paid labour, as well as moments of respite.

Made with the support of Bee’ah Sharjah Environment Company LLC
Participating Sweepers: Assainar Akkaparambil, Khayyum Shaik, Rafique Ahmed I Wagle, Altaf So Gulab Ali and Shaikh Afzal Shaikh
Inspector Assistant: Mohmed Babumiya
Sector Supervisor Waste Management:
Hussam Mohammed Faraj
Photography: Shanavas Jamaluddin and Vikram Divecha

While Mexico City’s solid-waste management system is unionised, at least 10,000 waste pickers are unpaid ‘volunteers’, relying on tips as they collect waste and recyclable materials to resell. Despite having no contracts or social protection, the government heavily relies on this free labour and profits from renting uniforms and tools to workers. Waste pickers put their own health at risk, a situation that worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic, to maintain their income and the health of residents and the city.

Prostitution was often associated with lower-class women without social status. In this book, Michael Ryan consulted public hygiene reports, city maps and police files to demonstrate the immorality of sex work, with a focus on the spread of contagious disease. Taking a compassionate approach to men’s health, while associating sex workers’ bodies with depravation, the book reveals 19th-century society’s moral judgements on sex work and sex workers, which continue today.

Money Makes The World Go Round is a new commission by artist Lindsey Mendick that honours a global history of sex work, revealing historical, contemporary, personal and collective narratives that too often remain unknown. 

Being heard is an ongoing and urgent demand for sex workers. This work has been developed through a process of listening and collaboration with SWARM members Juno and Polly and the author Mendez.

Two symbolic acts of resistance by sex workers formed the starting point for the work: the 1975 Saint-Nizier church occupation by over 100 sex workers in Lyon, France and the 12-day occupation of the Holy Cross Church in King’s Cross, London in 1982 by the English Collective of Prostitutes and their allies.

Here, the architecture of the church creates a shelter for community support and solidarity for global sex workers. The ceramic money boxes refer to the income that sex work provides – the predominant reason that people do this work. These ceramic sculptures, Mendez’s filmed sermon and the stained glass windows each refer to different histories of sex work from antiquity to today, celebrating those who continue to speak up for the existence, rights and struggles of sex workers.

Made in collaboration with: SWARM Collective members Polly Blake and Juno Mac and author and actor Mendez

Set Designer: Elouise Farley

Stained Glass: Claire Orme

Filmmaker: Guy Oliver

Lindsey Mendick’s Studio: Samuel Vilanova and Bryony Rose, HEKATE (Dominic Lauren, Vaso Papadopoulou, Aristea Rellou)

Scenic Painter: Zoé Parsons

Seamstress: Mum Mendick

This project is the outcome of an ongoing collaboration between the first South African trans sex worker support organisation SistaazHood, fashion designer Duran Lantink and photographer Jan Hoek. The Sistaaz are, in their own words, “fierce activists who are proud to be trans and sex workers”. Most workers in the SistaazHood collective are homeless, and live under a bridge near the Castle of Good Hope fort in Cape Town.

Gabby’s dream is to run a luxurious design brothel called Lady Marmalade and Joan Collins, the eldest member of the collective worked as a male nurse in the daytime and as a female sex worker at night. The series celebrate the Sistaaz’s lives, dreams and successes. They also recognise their struggles, as sex workers fight to access basic rights to healthcare, housing and other forms of work.

This large-scale poster was produced by the English Collective of Prostitutes in collaboration with the leading advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty as part of the campaign to repeal the 1956 Sexual Offences Act and 1959 Street Offences Act. It exposes the hypocrisy of sex workers’ treatment by the criminal justice system, while boldly advocating for the existence of sex workers’ rights.

This print is part of a major series called ‘Femme Maison’, which Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) began in the mid-1940s while looking after her three young sons. In the work she explores women’s relationship with the domestic space. Depicting a woman whose head is trapped in a house while her nude body is revealed, Bourgeois presents the home as both an oppressive and exposing environment.

Inspired by a portrait taken by the photographer J W Cleary in Jamaica in 1890, Shannon Alonzo produced this work in her grandmother’s house in Trinidad. She reflects on the hidden histories of her ancestors’ work as washerwomen and its impact on the body. The materials of the sculpture depict the effects of hot water and harsh soap on her hands, while the body’s decay mirrors the disappearance of the occupation itself.

In a project that features over 16 homes, Daniela Ortiz compares the size of domestic workers’ rooms with other rooms in luxurious upper-class houses in Lima, Peru. Using complete construction plans from architectural magazines and the firms that develop these homes, the work outlines the reality of “service architecture”, the living space provided for domestic workers. Daniela Ortiz highlights the difference between the size of the rooms cared for by the domestic workers and the space in which they live. The work reveals the oppressive and colonial nature of the workers’ relationship with their employers, reinforced by the architect’s design.

These paintings are inspired by words found in British health-and-safety manuals combined with the patterns of East African Kanga fabrics. These manuals are intended to protect workers, but also to control them. For Lubaina Himid, this desire for regulation echoes British colonial control. In Magda Stawarska’s accompanying soundtrack, Himid echoes the manual’s words against a background of construction-work sounds.

From 2019 to 2021, over 40 chambermaids at the Ibis Batignolles hotel in Paris went on strike to demand better working conditions and pay. These photographs document their long fight and highlight the collective action that led them to victory. Dressed in white sheets to represent their invisible labour, the women revealed injuries caused by repetitive physical work, and denounced the racial discrimination they faced.

In her work, Kelly O’Brien documents the working-class women in her family, playfully exploring the performance of low-paid cleaning work. Moving from intimate portraits to staged photography of her mother and grandmother, she also explores her own identity as a third-generation Irish immigrant. Concerned with class, politics and gender, O’Brien’s work questions the effect of work and working-class life on the body.

This participatory film was made with migrant domestic workers in the UK and documents the hard and exploitative work they endure in private homes across the country. Real-life testimonies are interspersed with hidden footage taken while at work. They are seen scrubbing the floor, hoovering, washing and cleaning repeatedly, exposing the exhausting nature of their work. ‘Our Journey’ also reveals the physical and psychological abuse they face. The Voice of Domestic Workers is an education and support group calling for justice and rights for migrant domestic workers in the UK.

Each year over 23,000 people migrate to the UK to work as domestic workers in private households. ‘Care Chains (Love will continue to resonate)’ asks us to consider how giving care is more than just a physical act, but is one that requires emotional labour and compassion.

Care work impacts people’s lives in many ways, both physical and invisible, but also creates a resonance that connects people.

Moi Tran investigates the body as an instrument of communicating care. The installation features footage of 12 women who are domestic workers. Through their percussive body movements, they channel love, joy, healing, the release of tension and collective resistance. The multisensory installation uses synchronised film, light, sound and vibration to create a moment to reflect on universal practices of care.

Made in collaboration with:

Performers: Ann Margaret, Darleen, Florence Carol, Foulera, Georgina, Ghie Ghie, Grace, Lovely Joy, MayBelen, Sahara, Vangi, Yolly from The Voice of Domestic Workers with support from Marissa Begonia, Ximena Ruiz Del Rio, Louise Shelley, Dotty, Joy, Precious and Lhyne.

Co-composer / Co-workshop facilitator:
Natasha Lohan

Co-composer / trombonist: Rosie Turton

Co-composer / cellist: Zosia Jagodzinska

Sound design: Michael Picknett

Body percussionist: Emma King

Movement collaborator: Anouk Jouanne

Sound collaborator: Mengting Zhuo

Recording: Ricardo Barbosa, Marco Carini, Ben Harvey, Joshua Hurley, Ollie Isaac, Joshua McCrow, Justin Margovan, Michael Picknett, Thea Stevenson, Lewis Sellars and Antonina Stulova with programming by Lewis Sellars

Editing: Ricardo Barbosa

Costume design: Khanh Brice Nguyen with Maria Silva

Lighting design: Satu Streatfield, Paul Simson

Artist assistant: Adelina Hess