Golrokh will recount numerous interactions she’s had with washing machines while practicing laundry, arts, and politics in Iran, the Arab world, and Europe. In her stories, she lives and washes with her collaborators and friends Ahmadali Kadivar and Giulia Crispiani. With her comedy, Golrokh recalls our positionalities within power structures and arts labor—travelling—crossing impossible colonial borders—and admiring friendship. She asks how we transfer labor to a machine when in need for clean clothes and how the machine works during an electricity shortcut in Beirut or in a small art venue in Europe.

By telling stories, Golrokh will present to us how the washing machine story transitioned from orality to a roll of drawings in October 2023 during Buenos Tiempos, Int.’s General Assembly at La Bassa Mar, a seminar and retreat space for trans, inter, non-binary, and queer people, centering those impacted by racism, in the region of Tarragona. All the while, Israel was intensifying their colonial campaign and genocide against the Palestinian people on another shore of the Mediterranean Sea: halfway through the washing machine comedy, violence was brought back to our discussions.

At the academy’s Labo Print, we will get the washing machine story to transition once more: this time into a zine.

Golrokh is an illustrator, puppet-maker, and visual artist whose practice is deeply shaped by political and social events. Audience participation and travel—conceived as ways of creating new maps and calendars—are central to her work:

“One of the characteristics of contemporary art, in its deep connection with Late-stage capitalism is the production of cultural workers with low wages—lured by the promise of traveling around the world and exhibiting in various cities. As capital circulates through art fairs and biennales and residencies, these workers, too, move around with their labor-level pay, helping to keep the art market increasingly vibrant. In this way, travel has become part of the lives of these low-paid workers — journeys that, on the surface, appear to signify professional success and global recognition for these artists, but in reality reflect the day-to-day existence of cultural workers, who may find themselves worrying about wearing clean clothes on the day of a performance and opening, struggling with broken and inefficient washing machines in modest residencies here and there.”

Born in Isfahan, Golrokh studied Industrial Design in Tehran and Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands. Her series Continuous Cities incorporates fabrics collected in cities such as Beirut, Cairo, and Lahore, installed alongside maps tracing her journeys in each host exhibition. Her works have been presented at the Art Rotterdam, the Busan Biennale, the Museum of Art in Finland, the Lahore Biennale, and in galleries including Aaran and Dastan in Tehran. She is also the author of Walvistraan, Sorrow, The Girl Without Hair, and Testimonies: Posters From 2009 to 2024.
 

Castillo first heard the washing machine story in residency with Golrokh at Centrale Fies in Dro in 2021. In Brussels, he runs Buenos Tiempos, Int. with Marnie Slater and teaches at MULTI: Master of Editorial Practices. In the course The Art of Books, he works with students to learn from Golrokh’s book Testimonies. He was born in Castilla-La Mancha, studied in Madrid, and works in Brussels. His work asks questions in the junctions of arts and queer community health.

MULTI invites Golrokh to perform a new transition of the washing machine story at Labo Print, the editorial platform of the Brussels Royal Academy of Fine Arts