Acts of Creation

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Acts of Creation photography project © Eli Pimentel - Image from the Acts of Creation photography project © Eli Pimentel - There is always a broom at hand waiting for a passer-by for its vivification. View all images ↓
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A photographic essay on the socio-cultural signification of the broom.

“I will also make it a possession for the porcupine,

And marshes of muddy water; I will sweep it with the broom of destruction,” says the Lord of hosts. — Isaiah 14:23 NKJV

Wielded by an incensed Omnipresence, the broom is that humble, devastating contrivance for unearthly intent and retribution, sanctified as the instrument of reckoning, and of redemption.

Acts of sweeping are also gestures - small, repetitive acts of care which affirm our humanity and we rely on objects to make reality intelligible, as grounding mechanisms in the face of changes in the lived world.

Through the broom, this project becomes a meditation on the unseen yet essential work of care and social reproduction—historically gendered—which mirrors the broom’s paradoxical nature: omnipresent and overlooked; foundational and unrecognised. In this way, the broom becomes an emblem of the quiet, sustaining forces that uphold society. As an economist, my focus is on care as essential to human wellbeing. It is my hope to emphasise, through discussions and exhibitions, our innate being-ness, away from discordances that would separate us should we allow it.

In Uzbekistan, I was struck by the ubiquity and construction of its brooms, entwined from water reeds or brushwood surely too large and unbending to capture swirls of dust and debris. The broom is the banal, and the transcendent— a metaphor for broader human struggles against disorder, embodying power and agency with unassuming simplicity.

Prosaically, brooms clean, and dirt is matter out of place. Dirt is the impure, that which affronts order and rightness, so that wrangling with pollution, contamination (or evil) is one of the preeminent systematising principles of society. And culture, since addressing disorder is a very human way of controlling the environment – of making sense of the causes of fear and anxiety, and establishing the ritual practices that bind communities around familiar acts of attracting fortune, safety, sustenance.

The broom is a harmonious thing, the head, rope and tail bound to serve a common goal. The broom within these grand narratives, exposes our vulnerabilities and our inescapable corporeality. Though made romantic and sublime as they undergo a crafting process, brooms exist to elevate our base materiality and thus never absolutely escape their functional capacity. The very thing that cuts off the object from its materiality is the thing that brings it to life.

 My interest in this subject arose through the nature of my work. As an economist, my focus is on the work of social reproduction –the care of children and the elderly, and labour in the home – as essential to human wellbeing. The unremunerated and hidden nature of this work, in national accounting systems, renders one class of economic agent –primarily, though not always, women – invisible.

Elizabeth Maria Pimentel January 2024 Acts of Creation

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Acts of Creation photography project
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Water reeds are used in many countries for practical purposes. Here, nature is the starting point of creation, the beginnings of order. A world in harmony, where no order has yet been disturbed.

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Acts of Creation photography project
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By the graveside, a little broom awaits its shift. The broom signals a shift from the natural to the human realm, where disorder is addressed through action, even when, at our mortal end, we slip back into the natural world.

© Eli Pimentel - There is always a broom at hand waiting for a passer-by for its vivification.
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There is always a broom at hand waiting for a passer-by for its vivification.

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Acts of Creation photography project
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The act of sweeping is commonplace at all hours of the day, even in the cleanest spaces such as this mosque in Samarkand. The is a symbol of the effort to restore, create and perpetuate order in a chaotic world. It represents an ongoing commitment to maintain shared spaces in balance.

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Acts of Creation photography project
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Care work is foundational. This labour, unrecognised, forms the backbone of community and of who we are as persons in our own right. This mother worked all day to keep the streets at their best. Her only break in the shift was collecting her son at the end of the school day.

© Eli Pimentel - An eerie scene greets the wanderer in this otherwise spiritual place.
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An eerie scene greets the wanderer in this otherwise spiritual place.

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Acts of Creation photography project
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Customarily, women propped a broom outside a door, or atop a chimney, to signal they were away from the hearth. In time, broomsticks signalled the oppressiveness of being tied to the home and a collective moral fretfulness over the domestic sphere. Paradoxically, broomsticks represented the conduit of escape, of gendered subversiveness in the figure of the witch.

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Acts of Creation photography project
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Domestic objects indicating ritual cleaning and welcome, are tied to cultural spaces and the societal practices that reinforce human connection.

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Acts of Creation photography project
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Freshly hung laundry signal acts of care and nurturing. It suggests both the constraints and the subtle subversiveness of gendered domestic roles, where maintenance extends beyond cleanliness to the care of personal spaces.

© Eli Pimentel - A peep into the utterly mundane.
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A peep into the utterly mundane.