Mare Spanoudaki | Unsung Objects

Public understandings of sex work have long been shaped by criminalization, shame, sensationalist media narratives, and cultural appropriation. Particularly in Greece, sex workers navigate conditions of precarity, stigma, and limited institutional support. Within this landscape, they are frequently spoken about yet rarely granted authorship over their own representation. Through the curatorial research project “Unsung Objects,” Spanoudaki seeks to create space for sex workers to reclaim their narratives, enabling them to articulate their lives beyond reductive and objectifying discourses.

At the core of this project lies an understanding of intimate, everyday objects as repositories of memory and lived knowledge. These are items never intended for institutional preservation, objects kept in bags, drawers, lockers, or pockets, that hold emotional, practical, and symbolic weight. By illuminating what sex workers choose to keep, carry, and care for, Spanoudaki intends to redirect attention toward the subtle and overlooked textures of their daily lives and labor.

Her methodology draws on “history from below” (popularized by E. P. Thompson), as well as Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” both of which reconsider how historical significance and cultural value are defined. Instead of elevating heroic figures or conventionally valorized artifacts, she aims to collect ordinary belongings and unveil the lives of those rarely acknowledged as protagonists. Under this lens, everyday objects cease to be peripheral details and become primary sources of insight and evidence of continuity, endurance, and survival.

Spanoudaki will engage with the idea of an ethnographic archive emerging through a process of collective meaning-making. Her wish is for the collected materials to take shape as a digital and/or physical exhibition that resists both romanticization and pathologization while affirming sex workers as complex historical subjects rather than social abstractions or spectacles.