(Archive) S.O.A.P.

Architecture of Hygiene

In the currency of times, it becomes nearly unimaginable to discuss bathing in sensuous and introspective form. The prevailing sanitary cells, we call bathrooms, alienate the relationship with our own exposed bodies. They feed germaphobia onto the heteronormative understanding of the body. S.O.A.P., Saponification of All Paradigms, is an interactve installation that reflects on the use of flesh, body parts and skin in combination with soap material as metaphors for rescripting the spatial norms of the bath. The soap materiality signifies the medium of bathing in the palpable imagination of when the water hits the skin. It exteriorizes that exact moment. Furthermore, the direct casting of the female bodies acknowledges that the body can be the spatial co-author in the building of the space.

The essence of this project is to rethink the spatial structures that manoeuvre around domestic spaces of bathing - and hygienes at large. This installation perceives bathrooms as essential spaces where we begin and end every single day; questioning our transition from Olympic size baths to modern 1m2 showers. The motivation came from perceiving bathing places as places of necessity due to the intimacy and vulnerability they allow to occur, grounding the possibility of encounters between body and mind. Holding the capacity of manifesting a mental space, bathing spaces allow for a saturated, multi-layered place of intense psycho-social dynamics, often hidden from the public eye. Notion embodied by the malformed sculptures.