Dreaming Cleaning

PHOTOGRAPHY

Jan 26

Dreaming Cleaning is a poignant documentary series by photographer Almudena Zambrana that moves between softness and strain, reverie and repetition. Drawing from her lived experience as a qualified migrant working as a cleaner in Australia, Zambrana reveals the emotional and psychological weight of repetitive, often unacknowledged labour. Through cyclical, dream-like imagery, the project exposes the fragile gap between education, identity and survival.

Photography Almudena Zambrana

Dreaming Cleaning is a documentary photography project that examines migration, labour precarity, and the psychological consequences of the growing disconnection between education, work, and economic survival. The project emerges from my lived experience as a qualified migrant working as a domestic cleaner in Australia, where accumulated cultural capital fails to translate into material stability.

“The project emerges from my lived experience as a qualified migrant working as a domestic cleaner in Australia, where accumulated cultural capital fails to translate into material stability.”

Raised within a meritocratic framework in which education promised progress and upward mobility, migration destabilised that narrative. The material conditions of survival demand the acceptance of work far removed from former identities, producing sustained mental exhaustion, confusion, and identity dislocation.

While grounded in a personal experience, Dreaming Cleaning reflects a broader condition affecting many qualified migrants navigating contemporary labour systems, where education no longer guarantees stability or continuity of self.

The project is structured through repetition and distance. Images move cyclically between dream-like states and material labour, articulating the gap between expectations and reality. Editing functions as a perceptual device rather than linear narration: the sequence gradually builds intensity until the body at work becomes visible, before descending again toward rest and imagined futures that remain out of reach.

Through rhythm and accumulation, the work conveys mental fatigue, disorientation, and the sensation of being caught in a recurring condition, inviting viewers to inhabit the psychological weight of repetitive, often unacknowledged labour.

About Almudena

Almudena Zambrana (Spain, 1996) is a documentary photographer based between Australia and Spain. She holds an MFA in New Documentary Photography from LABASAD (Barcelona), a degree in Fine Arts from Universidad Complutense de Madrid with a specialisation in photography at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Naples, and a degree in Physical Sciences.

Her work focuses on contemporary documentary and long-term projects exploring identity, belonging, labour, and lived experience. This hybrid background combines visual sensitivity with analytical thinking, shaping an approach attentive to the psychological and social dimensions of everyday life. Living and working across different countries has strongly informed her storytelling, particularly in relation to migration, displacement, and personal narratives within changing social contexts.

To see more of her work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram

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Dreaming Cleaning is a poignant documentary series by photographer Almudena Zambrana that moves between softness and strain, reverie and repetition. Drawing from her lived experience as a qualified migrant working as a cleaner in Australia, Zambrana reveals the emotional and psychological weight of repetitive, often unacknowledged labour. Through cyclical, dream-like imagery, the project exposes the fragile gap between education, identity and survival.

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Dreaming Cleaning

“The project emerges from my lived experience as a qualified migrant working as a domestic cleaner in Australia, where accumulated cultural capital fails to translate into material stability.”

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