Glycerin, palm oil, purified water, 2026 Among the belongings left behind by my grandmother, who passed away several years ago, I found a white bar of solid soap in her shower room a year later. It’s completely dried out, it had developed small cracks that almost resembled human scars.
She had held it in her hands every day and used it to wash her body. That small sculpture—the soap—shaped through repeated contact with her hands and skin, functions as an index of corporeal presence and lived, quiet time. Her daily life and the temporal conditions she inhabited no longer exist anywhere. Yet her memories and time remain embedded within the soap. When holding it, I am suspended between two opposing impulses: the desire to touch her by using the soap, and the wish to preserve her memories exactly as they are. This work proposes taking a bar of soap that has fallen out of use and been forgotten, and producing a negative mold of it using soap once again, thereby revealing its surface as a record of touch and time. Precisely because the material remains soap, the work engages the viewer in a ritual gesture, washing their hands, through which halted time is transformed into new life and a different narrative. At the same time, it provides a contemplative moment to reflect on what has been lost, allowing the act itself to become a form of homage and remembrance.