Preliminaries

Asha: Does liquid soap make you sad?
My feelings have changed over time, as the rush and drag in my days is broken up by moments in the bathroom mirror.
Running water, a brief pump of gel, and a sigh cut short as this minor relief is stolen quickly.

Lately I’ve been working from home and time has forgotten all about me.
Break in the bathroom mirror remain, and I have two bars of soap sitting in a saucer by my childhood sink.
Both precious gifts from a young woman who taught me the comfort of everydayness.

Soap is a pinnacle of the everyday, the mundane, and the often unappreciated. My dear friend once shared that taking breaks throughout the day to wash.

Her hands provide her with happiness, a strange sense of familiarity — 3azaa.
These days I think of her, I take breaks, and lather my hands in this fight. I remember, I relax.

Batool: Dreams of all that is possible after a shower.

I started making soap in a leap between theory and practice, and lost track of the rupture between them. Before
I started making it, I collected soap unknowingly and realized how often I ask people if I can use their bathroom.

With the common reply of “we don’t have a bathroom but we have a sink”, I asked to use the sink. Can I wash my hands?

While I didn’t really mind if the scent was truthful or deceiving, water source pushes for dedication to aroma.

Your jasmine filled my house for a month.
Running water.

Context

The effects and residues of soap making are translucent in contact with planned watering. Stone stools as functional assembly point within temporalities that might or might not intersect. A moment taken to be in the present and feel contact with a material in spite of it all. How does it feel to meet around it or miss the meeting?

With the disappearance of the baladi hammam, and the explosion of global market economics, overriding Attar shops replace the human approach with policy shifts for import and export. Soap remains on the shelves of supermarkets, with the same potential to lather, and very different consequences. Nabulsi Shahin has a big stamp on it that says 100% American Olive Oil. Neutralization became a vague promise rather than a goal.

Practicalities

In a 24-hour soap making workshop, we will spend a day and a half designing, carrying out, and setting a cold process soap recipe as a group.

The first day will consist of introductions, designing soap concept (recipe/scent/shape), visiting Wast al Balad to buy supplies for the project (small groups), and mixing and setting the soap.

The second day we will meet, then cut and shape the soaps. The session will close with a discussion facilitated by the former owner of a soap house in Jabal Amman. We hope to leave this session having covered observations about soap making process, and things to consider for the next meeting after six weeks where we will distribute the soaps.
In the hours you leave us, we can be in contact through text messages, phone calls, and fleeting thoughts. We wish we can share this time between mixing and cutting, if only it is possible.

We will reconvene six weeks after the initial day-long workshop to distribute the cured soap and discuss.

The workshop will be facilitated by Asha Athman and Batool El Hennawy.

This workshop is part of the second phase of our 2019 program at The Lab, bringing together artists and cultural practitioners from various backgrounds to look at the postcolonial context we inhabit through the metaphor of arrival and departure. Long shaped by forced diasporas and migratory flows, Amman will be approached as a living archive offering fertile ground for a conceptual and poetic archaeology of place.