The Color of Laundry

Leto Erin Keunen (b. 2000)is a Brussels-based visual artist and designer. Her practice explores gender narratives, domestic rituals, and embodied infrastructures within normative cultural frameworks.

Her work collects fragments, relations and stories from everyday life. She combines and restructures these elements to present them as speculative interpretations that challenge our perspective on power relations and the gestures that perpetuate them.

Everyday habits are turned inside out until they become vulnerable, relational and permeable. Her handmade objects and installations bring together sculptural forms and fluid materials that possess a performative potential. The resulting deconstructions of social conditioning and gender identity translate into spatial interventions suspended in states of liminality.

The Color of Laundry (2025)

The Color of Laundry
Kinetic installation, audio work
Steel, textile, soap, plastic, blue
Variable dimensions

Accompanying audio work
composed by Thessa Krüger.

Installation views by Anwyn Howarth.

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.

Text by Nadine Botha from the GS2025 catalogue published by Design Academy Eindhoven. This work was developed at the Contextual Design department of Design Academy Eindhoven in 2025. Supervised by Afaina De Jong, Ben Shai van derWal and Maia Kenney.

Publication The Color of Laundry: #Cleantok, failed productivity and the aesthetic imagery of laundry available for purchase, order through contact sheet or e-mail.