Maintenance Artist

Name: Maintenance Artist
Released: 2025
Duration: 95 min

Toby Perl Freilich / United States / 2025 / 95 min

Who cleans up when the party’s over? A portrait of a radical artist who turns her gaze toward the work that usually remains unseen. In collaboration with the New York City Department of Sanitation, Mierle Laderman Ukeles combines art with garbage collection, transforming maintenance into a creative practice. Archival material and a playful visual language trace her performative approach and ecofeminist thinking. The result is a vivid portrait of care as a political act—and of the everyday power that holds our society together.

Q&A

06.06. / Bundesplatz-Kino

Toby Perl Freilich

Director

Toby Perl Freilich is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and writer. She co-produced and co-directed Moynihan (PBS American Masters, 2024) and directed Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment, praised by NPR. She also worked on Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers—named by Andrew Sarris among 2003’s top nonfiction films—and Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans (PBS). A 2025 Jewish Film Institute resident, she writes for Tablet, Jewish Review of Books, and The Forward.

Işıl Eğrikavuk

UdK Berlin

Dr. Işıl Eğrikavuk is an artist and academic in Berlin working at the intersections of art, ecology, feminism, and collective care, bringing together storytelling, dialogue-based methods, and participatory formats across performance, workshops, and installations. The founder of the other garden, an artistic research project exploring ecological thinking and collective learning at Berlin University of the Arts, her work focuses on collaboration, interconnectedness, and transformative practices.