Type: Installation

Year: 2023

Client: Design Museum

 

In London, hanging laundry outside is frequently banned by housing providers in order to preserve the appearance of a building. Yet residents are often also discouraged from drying inside, to prevent the build-up of moisture and dangerous mould in small, poorly ventilated homes. Where should we dry our laundry?

 

D.A.M.P. is an installation produced for the Islands exhibition at the Design Museum in London. D.A.M.P. – or Drying And Moisture Performance, is an assemblage of domestic objects and systems, devised as a piece of speculative or critical design. A tangle of ducts, tubes and cables surrounds a t-shirt that proclaims ‘I am moisture’ – a reference to the impossible task of condensation guides instructing people to ‘reduce moisture.’ Above, a working dehumidifier churns the humidity in the air (produced mainly by the breaths of museum visitors) and turns it into liquid form. The tube suspended above the t-shirt dribbles the water onto the fabric, soaking it wet.

 

D.A.M.P. makes visible the system of moisture production, while highlighting the impossibility of private, mechanized solutions to public, systemic problems. The home cannot hold and conceal the seemingly private reproductive labour, nor can it shelter us from pollution.

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