A girl from Ghana

Subject: Prostitute in the red light district. To where and who is this subject connected? Our scope is to be able to untangle the threads attatched to this person, make maps of her movement and her connections, see how she uses the city.

Going around in the red light district we worked up the courage to try to talk to some of the sex-workers there. A girl from Ghana agreed to talk to us. She’s a quite nice-looking girl/woman, I’m guessing she’s in her mid-twenties, she doesn’t look so tired as so many of the other women in the area. She told us she came here seven years ago with her father. Three years ago she began working as a prostitute, simply because it seemed like the easiest way to earn money. Easy has to be an exaggeration, at least according to my idea of it. She said she’s working 18 hours a day, from 10 am to 4 am, six days a week. Not exactly my idea of easy money.

Working 18 hours a day means that she doesn’t really have time to use the city she’s living in , to experience it. For us it also means that our mapping of her will have to focus on other things in addition to her movement during the day. Finding out how the business is organized, what her clients are like, from who she rents her window etc, are all quite interesting factors.

We discover that our girl is not only a subject, she is also very much objectified. Not merely as an object of lust for certain clients and bypassers. By confining herself in such a narrow space that a red-light window is, she limits her own possibilites to affect her environment, she is very much dependent on people coming to her.

But obviously, in other ways she’s as much a subject as anyone else. She tells us that she’s working independently, not being organized in any way, no pimp watching her back and taking his share of the money. So if she sometimes decides to not come to work, that’s her choice. How long she stays at work, is also her choice. She tells us that she normally works very hard to make her rent, and that she allows herself a bit more slack when she has secured the day’s profit.

I must admit that what we discover by talking to this girl, is very different from what I expected to find. I was imagining that by interviewing a prostitute, a whole spiderweb of connections and relations would reveal itself to us. I was expecting to find unexpected connections of some sort, seeing that everything in this city is somehow tied together. Ok, I was perhaps hoping for too much. But what we’ve found actually contradicts all my assumptions. At least I would think that the Red Light District and Chinatown would be connected, if only by the fact that our girl would go to one of the chinese restaurants in the area. Of course these connections might still exist even if we haven’t discovered them yet.

But honestly, I don’t think we’ll find these links through our prostitute. In the little free time she has, she sometimes goes to a nearby bar to get a cup of coffee with one of her friends. They’re all prostitutes, for as she says, when should she have time to meet anyone else? So she seems to be operating in a very limited space, and the people connected to her aren’t making it a whole lot bigger. Tomorrow we’ll try to find her again (contrary to our assumptions she’s not in the same window every night, we recently discovered), and ask her more about her father and sister. Maybe that will be the link we need to a bigger web. Maybe.