Soap City
Installed within Firstdraft Gallery and on top of a nearby building, Sydney.
- Put on safety goggles and vinyl gloves
- Take measuring cup and slowly combine 421g of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) with 1000g of cold water (H2O); stir gently and leave to cool
- Combine 500g of coconut oil, 1000g of cottonseed oil and 1500 g of palm oil within stainless steel pot; gently heat until liquefied
- Take a thermometer and measure the temperature of both the oil and the sodium hydroxide solution; when both are within the range of 38 °C to 42°C combine the two
- Move the newly combined soap mixture to the plastic bucket; take modified electric mixer and beat soap mixture until saponification occurs
- Take saponified soap mixture and pour into moulds
- Leave to set for 24 hours
- Remove soap from moulds; leave to cure for 2 to 4 weeks
- Once the soap has cured you now know the ins and outs of the production of soap; as Italian architect and humanist, sculpture, painter and historian Leon Battista Alberti once put: “a man can do all things if he will”
With Soap City we wanted to survey the potential for a city to accommodate unfamiliar activity. Tentative results suggest that the city is an obliging animal of potentiality.
Soap City was one attempt to inject unfamiliarity into a familiar habit. We wanted to offer an alternative to the habitual act of bathing, that is, showering on a rooftop at a location reached by following a map transcribed on a block of soap. The exhibition was spread across two venues; the gallery being used as a space for manufacturing and distributing ‘soap-maps’, as well as the clandestine employment of a nearby rooftop that supported a showering unit and water tower (which in fact was a converted wine barrel).
A city is welcoming but it is not indiscriminate. Like any new commercial venture unfamiliar additions face a life or death process of classification and scrutinization before they are allowed a place at the table. Once folded into the wider-ecosystem of the city successful additions are likely to find themselves caught up in a heady process of adaptation and transformation.