In 2024, nibia pastrana santiago turned the Mead Art Museum’s freight elevator into a stage. Dressed in bright shorts, a sheer tank top and sunglasses—an outfit that nods to expectations of Caribbean fashion—she cleaned. Or rather: she performed cleaning. Moving to the cadence of salsa vieja, she engaged objects in a sequence of erratic, deliberately lazy, and erotic gestures. No task was completed. Her actions refused resolution, suspending cleaning between labor and choreography, function and excess.
The scene recalls Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s enduring provocation: how should the house of the muses be cleaned, and by whom? Both Ukeles and pastrana render visible forms of labor historically obscured and devalued through racialized, gendered, and neo-colonial frameworks. Yet while Ukeles labored, sweeping floors, dusting walls, hand-brushing museum stairs, pastrana’s gestures carefully stopped short of becoming labor. The distinction marks the distance between maintenance as duty and cleaning as provocation.
Cleaning exceeds maintenance. It operates simultaneously as a material task, meditative practice and political metaphor. “Cleaning” has been mobilized to justify forced deportation, censorship, and historical erasure, even as maintenance work remains essential to social, institutional, and ecological systems. To clean is to sustain, but also to erase. The same gesture that preserves can expunge; the same logic that orders can eliminate.
This issue takes “cleaning” as a site of tension: a field of material, symbolic, and political operations. What distinctions are produced between cleanliness and dirtiness, and who enforces them? What forms of life are maintained, and which are discarded? If maintenance is an endless Sisyphean task often realized by women and racialized groups, under what conditions does cleaning become empowering or belittling, violent or meditative?