Leto Keunen is a Brussels based visual artist and designer exploring the intersections of objects, social dynamics, and power structures. Her practice critically examines gender narratives and the relationships between public and domestic spaces, using spatial and material practices as a tool for questioning and reimagining existing systems.

Through a research-driven and participatory approach, she engages in installation art and speculative scenarios to challenge societal norms and foster critical reflection. Her work considers everyday practices as sites of resistance and collective transformation, seeking to inspire alternative modes of social interaction and shared responsibility.

The Color of Laundry

Kinetic installation
materials: steel, textile, plastic
images: Anwyn Howarth

2025

Although laundry is central to daily life, from 1960s domestic manuals to today’s #cleantok trends, an aesthetic of productivity continues to obscure gendered labour. ‘The Color of Laundry’ is a kinetic installation that repeatedly soaks fabric in dirty water and gathers lint, evoking the unresolved, cyclical nature of laundry work. Rather than depicting a process of cleanliness or efficiency, its stained textiles, leaking water, and endless cycles emphasize failure and resist closure.

A manipulated soundscape — composed of recordings of water, friction, and domestic gestures — disrupts the sensory satisfaction of ASMR, amplifying unsettling textures and motions. This sonic layer builds tension between comfort and disruption, heightening the physical gestures of the machine and challenging sanitized depictions of domestic labour.

By aestheticizing failure, the project exposes the political agency embedded in domestic work, emphasizing the importance of reclaiming everyday maintenance tasks as opportunities for confronting hidden labour and power structures.

This piece was developed at the Contextual Design department of Design Academy Eindhoven in 2025. Thesis supervisors: Ben Shai van derWal and Maia Kenney.