Migrant domestic workers socialize in Hong Kong?s former Central Market, opposite an exhibition that includes 1:1 drawings of the tiny spaces in their employers? apartments that they live in during most of the week. Photo by Eddie C.Y. Lam
Hong Kong pushes people together, with tiny apartments Tetris-stacked into high-rise buildings and a steady flow of traffic streaming into every available transit space. For migrant domestic workers (MDWs)?women mostly from the Philippines and Indonesia, who keep the city running by taking over house, child and elder care for a large percentage of its residents?the compression is even more dramatic. Legally required to live in-house, MDWs occupy whatever space their employers can spare: a bed in a room with a member of the employing family, a bunk rigged up over a toilet or a washing machine, a converted closet, a cot in the hall. Rarely does a woman employed as a MDW have a room to call her own, and even then, all the domestic space she touches is part of her place of work. In the exhibition Making Space, which ran over the summer in Hong Kong, Canadian curators Jennifer Davis and Su-Ying Lee assembled work that addresses the lives of the city?s domestic workers and the spaces they occupy. Filipina-Canadian Stephanie Comilang?s video Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso / Come to Me, Paradise uses a combination of drone and cell phone footage to imagine a science fiction-like view of migrant workers? lives, while Quebec artist Devora Neumark address...