Soap, 2026 Matsuyama, 12 Havu Mäntysuopa, 8 Alterra, 26 dalli, 14 Speick, 20 —, 14 Belle de Provence, 1 Ovis, 31 —, 20 Kapalıçarşı, 16 Speick, 24 alviana, 18 —, 12 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 invites the viewer to activate it through washing—transforming halted time into a new life and different narrative.