Foreign Helpers

Foreign Helpers is an interactive installation created within Post-Industrial Landscapes 3.0, Architectural Association Visiting School Hong Kong 2015.

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

With four projectors and four independent audio channels, interactors use a hand-held screen to explore images of Hong Kong filmed by AAVS students, paired with interviews in which foreign helpers shared their life experiences. This spatially deconstructed documentary aims simultaneously to explore domestic helpers’ experience 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 per cent of Hong Kong's population, an overwhelming majority are women. The condition of foreign domestic workers has been increasingly scrutinised by human-rights groups and criticised as tantamount to modern slavery. Documented cases of worker abuse include the successful prosecution of an employer for subjecting Erwiana Sulistyaningsih to grievous bodily harm, assault, criminal intimidation, and unpaid wages. In March 2016, the NGO Justice Centre reported that one domestic worker in six in Hong Kong was deemed to have been forced into labour.

The AA Visiting School is a global architecture programme and network. Launched in Dubai in 2008, it had hosted more than 4,000 students in over 100 programmes by the time of this project. AAVS Hong Kong 2015 consisted of a series of artistic-research studios. Directed by Tobias Klein and Victor Leung, the studio tutors included Ramon van der Heijden and Tomas Laurenzo.

The installation consists of a gallery space explored with a hand-held projection screen. The screen is instrumented with infrared LEDs tracked by any of four stations installed in the space. Each station consists of an infrared camera, a speaker, and a projector. The interactor uses the screen to explore the documentary through a spatial, metaphorical representation of the helpers’ experience of Hong Kong.

Beside this space, a screen presents short documentaries filmed and edited by the AAVS students.