Mama Klorin: A Conversation with Visual Artist and Women Cleaners

Thursday 25 Jun 2026

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. 

Co-organised with the support of the University of Westminster.

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

Chair: Petros Karatsareas, Pati Vardhami and Ioanna Papapavlou, curators of the exhibition Mama Klorin. 

Additional information

Doreida Xhogu

Doreida Xhogu (b. Selenica, Albania) is a visual artist based in Greece. She studied sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Afroditi Liti. Her solo exhibitions include Miniera (Geranis Festival, Romantso, Athens, 2020) and Qengjat e Vegjël (ERGO Collective, 2022). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Archaeological Museum of Delphi (2017), the Italian Embassy in Athens in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute (2017, 2019), the Numismatic Museum of Athens (2019), and MOMus – Experimental Center for the Arts, Thessaloniki (2020). In 2021 she took part in the 62nd Thessaloniki Film Festival exhibition, inspired by Jean Renoir’s satire The Rules of the Game, and in 2023 exhibited with the Chamber of Fine Arts of Greece at the Former Public Tobacco Factory, as well as in That which was is now no more at the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center. In 2024, she presented her Mama Klorin project at New York College, with the support of the Albanian Embassy in Athens.