My mother doesn't work

I am officially a housewife. Saying it out loud still embarrasses me because the word carries a shadow of idleness. Yet there is always work waiting, the kind that keeps a home alive and somehow appears to “do itself.”

"My mom doesn't work. She stays at home... well, she cooks, keeps the house clean, but she hasn't got a real work…" this is how my son answered his friend's question: "What does your mom do?".

I was nearby and heard this conversation. At that moment, I felt like a slacker and wondered what makes up my everyday life? If this life, which sometimes seems to consume me completely, is not a job, then what? Yes, I don't go to the office, I don't get an official salary. Not so long ago, my maternity leave with my third child ended, and now I am a housewife.

I'm embarrassed to say that I'm a housewife. Because for me it is, in a way, synonymous with a slacker. In my defense, I always clarify that I have three children and that I have a lot of worries with them and I don't have much time.

But at what time does the housewife's working day start and end? I don't know. According to my feelings, in a house where children live, it never ends. There's always some work awaiting for you to be done, even though it is regarded as non-existent. Those actions that are done on autopilot and in which a woman seems to mimic and dissolve into the house and everything seem to be done by themselves.

That’s why you can not see the face of my heroine in the project. You can't even always find her in a photograph at first glance. All the housework women do is often considered by the other members of a household as an invisible attribute that a home naturally possesses. This invisible work is not supposed to make a woman feel tired, they suppose. Staying home all day long doesn't represent the labor worth being recognized and appreciated from this outside perspective.

The work unfolds in two visual registers: staged, hyperbolic self-portraits that amplify the absurdity of daily life, and a second body of images that assembles the hidden traces of domestic reality — objects, fragments, documents, and even online comments that reveal both the intimate weight of care and the external pressures of social judgment.

This project is about the unseen labor that sustains families and the expectations that ask women to give endlessly while their efforts quietly disappear.