On Labour and Exhaustion: Tryst with Raul De Lara’s She’s So Tired (2019)
On Labour and Exhaustion: Tryst with Raul De Lara’s She’s So Tired (2019)

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, I engage with She’s So Tired (2019)—a soft and warped sculpture of a straw broom created by Mexican artist Raul De Lara. The sculpture was conceived as part of his intriguing experiments with the design of everyday tools of manual labour in the sculptural series Tired Objects (2018-). Following queer cultural critique’s turn to affect, sensation and form, I consider the artefact in its expansive materiality and examine how it theoretically, affectively and formally inquires into the inexorability of immigrant labour and exhaustion. Using insights from social reproduction theory, queer theory and human geography, I develop an ekphrasis of the sculpture to critically grapple with the aesthetic alterity. I argue that She’s So Tired (2019), in dramatizing the life extinguishing expropriation of the cleaners’ well-being, raises questions about the network of places, fantasies and people that anchor the reproduction of life in the twenty-first century.

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