SILVIA’S NAILS
Nail Art Workshop Design Department
by Pernilla Philip, Insa Deist, Anna Bierler, Katharina Nejdl
Thursday, March 18th / OT301
as part of the Students for Students Workshops in Anja Groten’s class, winter semester 2020/21
photos by Hoai Le Thi

On a scale between a private intimate domestic endeavor and the global urban (economic) landscape, where commodified touch and care is performed, we find the nail salon. They have a tendency to be gendered and feminised spaces globally, in eurocentric countries they additionally are heavily racialized spaces. 1, 2
Take a close look at mundane and opaque stereotypes and symbols of the other or the self as a way to critically observe images of selfhood and construction of otherness, the nail salon can be that space.

1: The legend says that the Bird actress Tipi Hedren visited, in 1975, a female Vietnamese refugee camp in California. Apparently the women were fond of Hedren’s manicured nails. For the Hollywood female star charity was a needed attribute, and Hedren financed a nail workshop for 20 women within the camp. The legend says that this is where the nail industry was born. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32544343 ((even tho this fact be true it‘s still a questionable retelling of white hegemony))

2: What I know is that the nail salon is more than a place of work and workshop for beauty, it is also a place where our children are raised—a number of whom, like cousin Victor, will get asthma from years of breathing the noxious fumes into their still-developing lungs. The salon is also a kitchen where, in the back rooms, our women squat on the floor over huge woks that pop and sizzle over electric burners, cauldrons of phở simmer and steam up the cramped spaces with aromas of cloves, cinnamon, ginger, mint, and cardamom mixing with formaldehyde, toluene, acetone, Pine-Sol, and bleach. A place where folklore, rumors, tall tales, and jokes from the old country are told, expanded, laughter erupting in back rooms the size of rich people’s closets, then quickly lulled into an eerie, untouched quiet. It’s a makeshift classroom where we arrive, fresh off the boat, the plane, the depths, hoping the salon would be a temporary stop—until we get on our feet, or rather, until our jaws soften around English syllables—bend over workbooks at manicure desks, finishing homework for nighttime ESL classes that cost a quarter of our wages.“ Ocean Vuong, On Earth We‘re Briefly Gorgeous