Domestic Study No. 1 : ZT Tosha
ZT Tosha — Bathroom as Archive of Residue
Two things remain constant across the Domestic Study series: the bathroom, and a black hairdresser’s cloth. Everything else changes — whatever object is already in the room, placed into relation with the cloth and the space. The work lives in that relation.
The bathroom is the site because the bathroom is where the body’s residue collects. Hair, skin, nails, breath on a mirror — the body’s discarded matter passes through this room on a daily cycle, quietly processed and removed. It is an archive of what the body sheds, though no one calls it that, because what it archives is classified as waste. The bathroom does not display what the body produces. It disposes of it, without ceremony, and asks no one to look.
The hairdresser’s cloth is the instrument of that same process. Its only function is to catch hair at the moment of cutting — to receive dead protein at the precise instant of its separation from the body. It is anonymous, black, reusable, belonging to no one in particular. Hung on a rail in a bathroom, stripped of its chair, its mirror, its scissors, it is an instrument without its event. The cutting is implied and absent. What remains is an object built to collect what the body sheds, now simply present in the room where what the body sheds is processed by other means. Two systems for the same material, occupying the same frame.
In Domestic Study No. 1, the cloth meets a pale blue loofah. The loofah exists to remove dead skin — to scrub away the body’s surface layer so that a new one can form underneath. It does on skin what the cloth was built to do for hair: it catches what the body no longer needs. The two objects were never designed to relate to each other. They share no manufacturer, no context, no intended proximity. Yet placed together in this room, they turn out to be doing the same thing. The bathroom did not need to be rearranged to reveal this. It only needed to be looked at with both objects in frame at once.
This is the archaeology of the title: not excavation of the ancient, but excavation of the immediate. Hair and skin are the building blocks of the body — protein, structure, the material of which a living thing is made — and the bathroom is where those building blocks, once shed, are classified as waste and removed. The cloth and the loofah are both instruments of that reclassification. To photograph them together, in the room where this daily process occurs, is not to elevate them. It is to look directly at what they have always been doing.
This bathroom corner operates in the space where language fails and objects begin to speak in a different register. Our understanding of the world is shaped by sensory input and the architecture of memory — and the bathroom is precisely where that architecture is most naked, most daily, most stripped of pretense. What Tosha’s practice makes visible is that this room has always been doing philosophical work. It simply had no one watching.
Domestic Study is the private chamber of Tosha’s ongoing cycle OPUS: THE ASSEMBLER (2025–) — not its public face, but its domestic interior. Where THE ASSEMBLER works in black fabric, steel cable, and tension before an audience, Domestic Study returns that same language to the room behind closed doors. The hairdresser’s cloth is black, it hangs, it is bound by ties that dangle but do not yet knot. The assembler here is assembling in private — or failing to. The bathroom is where we construct ourselves each morning and dismantle each night. The cloth and the loofah hang in that interval.
Each installation in the series exists only long enough to be photographed. The cloth goes back into use. The loofah returns to the shower. The room resumes its ordinary function. What remains is the image — the only form in which this alignment of objects persists, can be looked at, can be held. The photograph is not documentation of the installation. It is the installation’s only durable form, and the form in which each Domestic Study is offered.
Domestic Study No. 1 is the first study in an ongoing series. Each work that follows returns to the same bathroom with the same cloth and finds a different object already present — a different mundane instrument of the same daily process. What changes each time is the third element and the relation it forms. What does not change is the archive it is made in, and the question the cloth brings with it: what does this room hold, and what does it cost the body to pass through it every day?
