I’ve been giv­ing a lot of thought to wash­ing lately. I don’t have a wash­ing machine in my apart­ment in Cagliari which means that some­thing I usu­ally take for gran­ted – being able to wash and dry my clothes at home and whenever I like – imposes itself as an activ­ity to find a solu­tion to and organ­ise. Laun­der­ettes are not com­mon­place here, and although I have now loc­ated one in easy reach, it is not some­where I rel­ish spend­ing an after­noon. There is how­ever a lavan­deria (dry clean­ers) which offers a ser­vice wash for sheets, tow­els and intimi as they told me (under­wear, night­wear etc), so long as you’re not in a hurry to get your stuff back that is (the 2–3 day estim­ate has already become 5…). Per­haps it’s my gen­eral pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with wash­ing then that’s aler­ted me to its pres­ence, walk­ing down the street espe­cially: in fact, it’s so present here that it almost goes unre­marked, part of the urban décor perhaps.

I should cla­rify. What I’m say­ing only applies to a par­tic­u­lar part of town (and other parts of other towns like it no doubt). Along with what’s per­miss­ible as a social prac­tice, the archi­tec­ture of the space, internal and external, makes for this form of dis­play of wash­ing. The streets are nar­row, con­tain­ing indi­vidual houses and apart­ment build­ings, up to 4 stor­ies high. Con­struc­tion is old, the internal space mostly com­prised of small rooms, and only a minor­ity of dwell­ings appear to have private out­side space. Not that there’s a clear-cut dis­tinc­tion between private and private. This is indeed the point: space is con­tested, and what might be regarded in prin­ciple as pub­lic is inhab­ited and made to feel and func­tion as if it’s private (Man­dich, 2010).

Back to the ques­tion of where to get your wash­ing dry. There is an import­ant dis­tinc­tion to be made here too. No one does their wash­ing in pub­lic. The eras­ure of dirt is largely a private affair (as every­where in the West). But dry­ing wash­ing is a dif­fer­ent mat­ter. The bal­conies around here are mostly the type where there is no floor space on them as such (so-called Juliet bal­conies) so no room to hang out wash­ing within them. What they do provide how­ever, is sup­port for a frame for dry­ing into the space between build­ings above the heads of passers-by. And in rain or shine. In one of the pho­tos above, there is a dec­or­ated plastic sheet to pro­tect against showers – and dust per­haps? Not every­one has even this type of bal­cony though. So what are they sup­posed to do? (This is not a world – or a cli­mate – where tumble-dryers are the norm.) The solu­tion (or at least, one vis­ible solu­tion) is kind of obvi­ous: you just put your wash­ing out to dry in the street, on a stand, simple (as in the cluster of images below). Only this isn’t quite your space, at least not form­ally. But you do it any­way. And as if it’s not there. Indeed, what is most inter­est­ing about all this is not even the fact of the wash­ing in the street but the expos­ure of it, of cloth­ing includ­ing under­wear, that people might go to some lengths to con­ceal in other pub­lic contexts.

The dis­play of clean wash­ing can also be read as a kind of declar­a­tion, if an obscured one, of the labour it takes to remove dirt (van Herk, 2002: 894). Women’s labour that is (whether in the home or the laun­der­ette by all appear­ances). This labour has vari­ous rhythms, which the vis­ib­il­ity of wash­ing in the street makes pub­licly appar­ent. The sud­den pres­ence of wash­ing hanging from bal­conies at the week­ends sug­gests a tight week­day sched­ule, per­haps dom­in­ated by paid work, whereas the appear­ance of a large amount of wash­ing along my street on a Wed­nes­day morn­ing tells a dif­fer­ent story.

Any­way, I’m just off to the lavan­deria to see if my own wash­ing is done…

Ref­er­ences
Man­dich, G (a cura di) (2010) Cul­ture quo­tidi­ane, Addo­mesticare lo spazio e il tempo. Roma: Carocci editore.
van Herk, A (2002) ‘Invis­ib­il­ised Laun­dry’ Signs 27(3): 893–900.