The video it's a part of an art installation from project "Other White" by Edyta Majewska.Edyta Majewska came with her daughter to live in Scotland in 2006. Ten years later while she was working as a cleaner in a school in Glasgow, the sports hall was set up with polling booths for the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. As a Polish national, Majewska had become worried for her own future. Although highly educated, language barriers and economic necessity sometimes led her to take on jobs where she felt socially invisible. Now the voices of bigoted politicians were making her feel she could very shortly be made to disappear altogether. Majewska turned her anger and frustration in a positive direction. On the day before the Brexit referendum she filmed herself sweeping up around the polling booths. Later she coupled this footage with Nigel Farage’s grating voice to make a short but powerful video, The Other White. Farage was gloating over the Brexiteers’ historic victory that came, he claimed, because of the EU’s open door policy on immigration. Seventeen million people voted for Brexit because immigrants had created too much pressure on wages, GP appointments and kids places in schools. Really?
The short film was the beginning of an investigation into the experience of being someone who ticks the ‘other white’ box in the equalities section of job application forms. The toxic xenophobic atmosphere surrounding the Brexit campaign led Majewska to apply for British citizenship. In October 2018 after a long and very expensive process she finally swore her oath and received her certificate as she posed beneath a picture of the Queen in Glasgow City Chambers. The whole process of becoming a British citizen cost in the region of two thousand pounds, but with it came a relative sense of security. Unless the current rules change, Majewska’s daughter Nikoletta will need to work and pay taxes for another four years before she too has the opportunity to go through the same process.
Majewska has created a multi-layered body of work in response to Brexit that is based on her direct experience as a working class woman and immigrant in Scotland.