Soap designs

In 2021, in the middle of a never-ending handwashing frenzie during the pandemic, I visited Michel Mansour, a 86 year old soap maker in Koura, Lebanon, to design a series of soaps using his life long expertise, my experimental design approach, his home grown olive oil and a 3000 year old recipe. Developing from two very different individuals into working as one hand, constantly inspiring and learning from each other, we made a series of soaps, sculptures and experiments in the middle of the ongoing Lebanese crisis, to create focus on a dying craft.

Hot process soap made from Olive oil and laurel berry oil, my hands, simple tools like stanley knifes, rules, plastice tubes and empty water bottles and rubble from the Beirut port blast.

By working with soap as a sculpting material rather than something that’s solely meant for handwashing and without being able to ignore the political and social status of Lebanon at a time of constant failing electricity, no running water, a countrywide supply deficit of gas for cars and generators, hyperinflation and daily riots due to years of government corruption, we created a series of soap sculptures, often using rubble from the Beirut blast as stands or cast into the soap as a comment to how the lebanese government has been washing their hands off the Lebanese people for decades. We also used the soap to mend broken pieces of rubble to give it a new life. We used the soap in many different ways and found that soap as a sculpting material is really amazing.

I was often mesmerized with the textures of the big uncut soap slabs that were produced by Michel and I found a lot of inspiration in these rough, unexpected textures

We mainly made hot process soaps that were all hand carved - both into functional soaps and to soap sculptures

We also played around with some cold process soaps, pouring the soap mixture inmoulds I had prepared from home