Mama Klorin: A Conversation with Visual Artist and Women Cleaners

A panel discussion centring the voices of women cleaners of Greece in the 1990s–2000s. Behind each mop-stroke lie displacement and invisible labour. Doreida Xhogu’s Mama Klorin explores memory, migration, class and human dignity, issues that resonate across borders, generations and social divides. 

Here the women cleaners speak for themselves, not as symbols, but as people with voice, memory and lived experience. Centring Doreida Xhogu’s Mama Klorin project, initiated in 2015 as an emotional territory shaped by her and her mother’s experiences as migrant cleaning workers, the conversation brings personal testimony into dialogue with art, migration and social history. 

Through stories rarely heard in public, the speakers trace what migration demanded of them and what it made possible: what they left behind (homes, families, lives and careers), and what they encountered on arrival, often invisible labour, inequality and the daily reality of being overlooked, alongside resilience, solidarity and persistence. They will reflect on the different routes that nonetheless converged in the same occupation and on the embodied experience of cleaning work. The tired body, the passing glance, the silence that can accompany everyday labour. Across each testimony emerges the richness of their identities as women, mothers and workers, reminding us that questions of dignity and value concern us all. 

Speakers: Adriana Xhogu, Liliana Saliaj, Maria Michalakopoulou, Doreida Xhogu.  

Chair: Pari Vardhami and Ioanna Papapavlou, curators of the exhibition Mama Klorin.