Foreign Helpers is an interactive installation created within the Architectural Association Visiting School (AAVS) 2015, in Hong Kong.

Directed by Tomas Laurenzo with the collaboration of AAVS students, the installation explores the relationship of foreign domestic helpers with the city of Hong Kong.

With four projectors and four independent audio channels, interactors can use a hand-held screen to explore images of HK (filmed by AAVS students) paired with interviews of foreign helpers who shared their life experiences. This spatially deconstructed documentary aims at simultaneously explore the domestic helper’s experience of the city of Hong Kong and to document their narration in their own words.

Foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong are domestic workers employed by Hong Kong residents, typically families. About three percent of Hong Kong's population, an overwhelming majority are women. The condition of foreign domestic workers is being increasingly scrutinised by human-rights groups and criticised as tantamount to modern slavery. Documented cases of worker abuse, including the successful prosecution of an employer for subjecting Erwiana Sulistyaningsih to grievous bodily harm, assault, criminal intimidation and unpaid wages, are increasing in number. In March 2016, an NGO, Justice Centre, reported its findings that one domestic worker in six in Hong Kong were deemed to have been forced into labour.

The AA Visiting School is a global architecture programme and network comprising different forms. Lanuched in Dubai in 2008, the AAVS has now hosted over 4000 students in more than 100 different programs. The AAVS HK 2015 consisted of a series of artistic research studios. Directed by Tobias Klein, Victor Leung, Tobias Klein, Ramon van der Hejiden, and Tomas Laurenzo were studio tutors.

The installation consists of a gallery space that can be explored with a hand-held projection screen. The screen is instrumented with infra-red LEDs that can be tracked by any of the four ‘stations’ installed in the space. These stations consists of an infra-red camera, a speaker and a projector. This way, the interactor uses the screen to explore the documentary interacting with a spatial metaphoric representation of the helpers experience of Hong Kong.

Next to this space a screen presents the short documentaries filmed and edited by the AAVS students.