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Best friends Mona Chalabi (left) and Emmy the Great (Emma-Lee Moss) have used symbols and sounds to make statistics more accessible. Photo: Ashley Batz for Wolcott Takemoto

Data, sound and art combine to highlight gender disparity among Hong Kong domestic helpers

  • Mona Chalabi and Emmy the Great’s inclusive mixed-media installation highlights the 65:1 ratio of female to male domestic workers in the city
  • Work will show at the Spark festival at Tai Kwun this weekend

When best-friend power couple Mona Chalabi, a data journalist and illustrator, and musician Emmy the Great (Emma-Lee Moss) decided to make art together, it was only natural that they would create a project where their respective mediums – visual and audio – could meet.

But that was not the only inspiration for their installation “Migrant Workers: Seen and Heard”, which shows this weekend at the British Council’s Spark Festival of Ideas in Hong Kong.

Instead, the pair, who became friends after meeting in New York in 2016, wanted to use the festival’s “Science and Art of Creativity” platform to experiment with making statistics accessible, and inclusive, using sound.

It was a new approach for Chalabi, who is known for her simple and incisive illustrations of data on social issues. But it was one she felt was necessary to address after a visually impaired person asked her: “What does your work do for me?”

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“The answer was honestly ‘nothing’ – my work excludes a lot of people,” says Chalabi, who works in New York but was raised in the UK.

“Sound is obviously a great way to convey information, and there’s been some interesting examples of data sonification in the past, but it hasn’t really been done that well. I felt Emma was the perfect person to figure that out with.”

The installation, which will be shown in the Prison Yard of the Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, is the pair’s initial attempt at creating a solution.

The pair believe the most creative community in Hong Kong is its domestic helpers. Photo: Ashley Batz for Wolcott Takemoto

The project is based around a simple data point, but one that defines Hong Kong: the gender ratio of the city’s 370,000 foreign domestic workers. Using a television with a set of headphones and an embossed illustration, the installation looks to transform this group’s ratio of 65 women for every one man into something “seen and heard”.

“There is something very shocking about the fact that 65 women for one man have to leave their home and their families behind in order to support them. It’s quite sobering,” says Moss, who grew up in the UK and Hong Kong, where she now lives and makes music as Emmy the Great.

Moss said it was the theme of the Spark festival, which looks to celebrate creativity in daily life, that moved them to choose a statistic about foreign domestic workers.

“The most creative community in Hong Kong is the domestic workers, in terms of transforming public space into an arena for expression every weekend,” says Moss, who has incorporated audio recordings of her interviews with Hong Kong’s domestic workers into her music in the past.

So much of data journalism is dehumanising. You just see the numbers and you forget about the individuals
Mona Chalabi

The installation at Spark combines an animation of the data by Chalabi with a soundtrack made up of the voices of 65 female foreign domestic workers and one male domestic worker, compiled and produced by Moss. The accompanying embossed illustration is tactile, with 65 three-dimensional female icons on one side and a single male icon on the other.

“You could touch it and potentially feel the data too, if you are partially sighted or blind,” says Chalabi, noting that they have invited a group from Arts with the Disabled Association Hong Kong to the exhibit to provide feedback.

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Apart from promoting accessibility, the vocal layer blending women’s voices adds an element that can often be missing when stories are told with data.

“So much of data journalism is dehumanising,” Chalabi says. “You just see the numbers and you forget about the individuals – that every single one of these numbers represents a real person with a real life.

“This feels like a natural collaboration in that sense, because that human-centred approach is so critical to anything that we do, and I knew that any sound that [Moss] designed would have that.”

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Migrant Workers: Seen and Heard, Prison Yard, Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, Central, January 18-20. Fri 11am-5pm, Sat and Sun 10.15am-5pm

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