On Sundays We Play - Photo Book
Purchase this beautiful coffee table photobook about Singapore’s migrant domestic worker volleyball scene. Filled with professional art prints and original stories from migrant domestic workers, all profits raised will be donated to our fundraiser that supports these volleyballers with the costs of running their leagues.
Buy here via our website (for those living outside of Australia, international shipping fees will be incurred)
Singaporean readers can purchase locally via Ethos Books
Purchase this beautiful coffee table photobook about Singapore’s migrant domestic worker volleyball scene. Filled with professional art prints and original stories from migrant domestic workers, all profits raised will be donated to our fundraiser that supports these volleyballers with the costs of running their leagues.
Buy here via our website (for those living outside of Australia, international shipping fees will be incurred)
Singaporean readers can purchase locally via Ethos Books
Purchase this beautiful coffee table photobook about Singapore’s migrant domestic worker volleyball scene. Filled with professional art prints and original stories from migrant domestic workers, all profits raised will be donated to our fundraiser that supports these volleyballers with the costs of running their leagues.
Buy here via our website (for those living outside of Australia, international shipping fees will be incurred)
Singaporean readers can purchase locally via Ethos Books
Asia possesses the bulk of the world’s domestic workers – many are migrant women from the poorest countries in the region.
Migrant domestic workers are employed on temporary work permits, paid low wages, work long hours, and many must live in the homes of their employers which can, in some cases, lead to forms of exploitation and abuse. Often only granted one day off a week, when migrant domestic workers occupy public space en masse on their rest day, usually Sundays, their visible presence is often seen as a nuisance by local residents. They are marginalised as transient subjects despite living for many years in the cities in which they labour.
In the global city of Singapore, migrant domestic helpers make up almost a fifth of the city state’s large foreign workforce. On Sundays, We Play is a visual ethnography illuminating the leisure practices of a large group of migrant domestic workers mainly from the Philippines, Indonesia, and India, who gather for self-organised volleyball games at the site of Singapore’s old airport in Kallang. Just outside of the glistening city centre, Old Terminal Lane is now a vacant and forgotten space in the city. The social world the women have built in this interstitial zone, however, gives the space new meaning through empowered practices of self-care and informal infrastructures of social and economic support they have developed among each other.
Ethnographic and portrait photography make visible the multidimensional identities of migrant domestic workers and together with original written works of personal reflections and poetry from the volleyballistas, this book highlights these women’s creative capacities for community work, their physical talents and achievements on the sporting field, and their contribution to city-making in Singapore through caretaking practices of the forgotten spaces in the city.