Roof Laundry – public Intimacy
2025. Social Practice. Operation Himmelblick, Pame Kaimakli Festival. Nicosia, CYP.
CONTEXT: Rooftops were traditionally used for washing and for informal social exchange. Though household machines have reduced the practice, rooftops still carry strong cultural associations with communal life, but stay often “unused”.
TEXT: As part of the Pame Kaimakli Festival, Operation Himmelblick created the Laundry Salon – an immersive, participatory installation developed through a week on site and pretests in Berlin. The project invited neighbours to rethink washing as a shared ritual, touching on the question of intimacy. Residents were encouraged to wash clothes on the rooftop, leaving one garment with an attached personal story for display throughout the festival, turning everyday textiles into a temporary communal archive.
The washing-salon motif foregrounded intimacy, proximity, and the symbolic weight of clothing. By moving private garments into a public setting, participants navigated the boundary between domestic life and shared experience. Archival elements such as custom labels and washing-symbol designs preserved these exchanges. At the end, each garment returned to its owner marked with a new button – a small trace of a brief, communal rooftop world. The week ended with a final performance, which engaged the collected stories of Kaimakli.
The Salon also sparked conversations about space itself. Rooftops – often inaccessible, commercialized, or overlooked – were treated as sites for public imagination, reflecting Operation Himmelblick’s ongoing political focus on rooftop accessibility and collective re-appropriation of urban space.
Operation Himmelblick Team: Bianca Maria Fasiolo, Chiara Garbellotto, Julia Sulikowska, Jakob Margit Wirth, with invited artist Rafaela Constantinou.
More Information:
Pame Kaimakli : https://pame-kaimakli.org/operation-himmelblick/
Photo and Video:
Nafsika Hadjichristou, Emily Anna Mavridou, Youssef Habib
