I’ll be late tonight is an autobiographical project, made while I was living in a gated expatriate residence in Russia between 2012-2020. In that secluded housing community, hosting expatriates from different countries, men and women performed traditional gender roles, with families being organised around the breadwinner/homemaker model. During the long winters, while the husbands were at work and the children at school, the expatriate women would spend most of their time inside their homes.
Spouses who move abroad for their partners’ careers are called ‘dependants’ on their visas. Statistics show that 84% of them are women. Given the patriarchal social structure of the expatriate community, I was trying to make sense of the notion of power in marital relationships and its dynamics, following the changes brought by the family’s migration. As an expatriate woman, the feelings of displacement inherent to the process of migration were exacerbated by the isolating nature of housework and the sense of confinement in the domestic space.
To some extent, and in many cultures, every wife becomes a housewife and sociologists agree that generally, women make more adjustments for their marriage than husbands do. The economic dependency on their partners, coupled with a lack of acknowledgement and value in capitalist society of the role of women as homemakers and stay at home mothers, affect the psychological well being of the housewife. These often unspoken aspects led me to question the extent to which our identities are socially constructed and which are the implications on women’s sense of self and identity being primarily identified by their role of wives and mothers.
The consensual nature of this social mechanism became a central point of my research. I was investigating the idea that the pressure to conform to gendered assumptions and expectations was contributing to women internalising personal codes of behaviour that encouraged the perpetuation of the same gender-biased hierarchy. The projection of perfection extending to femininity, home and an idealised nuclear family made me examine my own constructed identity in relation to others.
In making the book, I explored the various ways language reshapes how people construct and deploy versions of identities, including the role of mass media in constructing the gender norms and structures in the larger social system. The discordant chorus of voices in the project was a way to construct a parallelism between word and image, between the order of words and the order of things.
I’ll be late tonight is challenging the myth of domestic bliss and addresses the idea of home as a place of resistance, from a subjective experience, where identities involve a performative, and ultimately isolating act.
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Roxana Savin is photographic artist who engages with the politics of space, and the relationship between place and identity. Growing up in Romania, part of a generation that experienced both communism and postcommunism, she researches projects rooted in her personal history and seeks to rebuild an identity that is intimately linked to the past while simultaneously moving away from it.
After acquiring a law degree and working in the legal field, Savin emigrated and has been living in different countries for the last 15 years. The experience of migration informed her interest in how social forces and individual experiences create a process by which previous notions of identity may be challenged and redefined.
Savin studied photography at Fine Art School of Photography Moscow and was awarded an MA Photography with Distinction by Falmouth University UK in 2020. Her most recent work, ‘I’ll be late tonight’, shown here, foregrounds her personal narrative as an expatriate woman to discuss gender roles, identity and power relations within social structures. She is interested in the situation of women in contemporary society and the challenges they face in balancing societal expectations in terms of family and personal development.
