Virtual Cleaning Service for Art Museums and Institutions
(2024/25)
Video installation, virtual reality, performative action,
Frame photos and documents.
watch video
For the "Virtual Cleaning Service for Art Museums and Institutions" project, Melis assembles a team of artists and precarious workers from marginalized Latin American and African communities. They offer a "virtual cleaning" service to modern and contemporary art museums in Europe and the U.S., particularly those with colonial ties. Using the museums' virtual galleries, they transform the computer cursor into cleaning tools to perform real-time "cleanings" within the virtual exhibition spaces.
This act of "cleaning" is a symbolic intervention. Those historically excluded from the art world "cleanse" museums linked to colonial appropriation, challenging centuries of power structures. Melis invites these groups to collaborate, and upon completion, sends the institutions documentation and an invoice based on the cleaned space and museum prestige, triggering confrontations.
The project highlights power dynamics in art, as marginalized individuals take control of virtual spaces, transforming cleaning into symbolic resistance that questions power structures in art and technology's role in inclusion and critique.
This act of "cleaning" is a symbolic intervention. Those historically excluded from the art world "cleanse" museums linked to colonial appropriation, challenging centuries of power structures. Melis invites these groups to collaborate, and upon completion, sends the institutions documentation and an invoice based on the cleaned space and museum prestige, triggering confrontations.
The project highlights power dynamics in art, as marginalized individuals take control of virtual spaces, transforming cleaning into symbolic resistance that questions power structures in art and technology's role in inclusion and critique.
project premiered at Andreani Foundation, Buenos Aires, 2025.
photo credits: Adrian Melis
video stills
