Lampoon #32 - SOAP
Lampoon SOAP is a journey through stains, purity, and contradiction. A visual and textual investigation that moves from microplastics dispersed in oceans to blood that refuses to be washed away. Soap is approached both as an everyday object and as a metaphor: cleansing as an act that heals, purifies, and reassures, but also as a process that exposes guilt, hypocrisy, and the impossibility of absolute cleanliness.
Soap is never just soap. It washes, it soothes, it promises renewal — yet it reveals what remains underneath. Moral stains, polluted water, compromised systems. Humanity’s cycle of collapse and restart. As Malaparte wrote, human beings become tolerable only when they fall into the mud of their own dismantling. Soap, then, serves to wash — and to stand up again.
Cleaning the world, dirtying the water
Lampoon 32 SOAP confronts a central paradox: what does it mean to be clean, when the very act of cleaning dirties the water itself? From polluted rivers to stained consciences, this issue insists that sincerity exists only through contradiction. Every life carries its own grime; every attempt at purity leaves a trace.
The issue moves between soap’s domestic and industrial dimensions: washing machines without microfiber filters releasing plastic into rivers; blended fabrics — cotton mixed with polyester, jeans with elastane — shedding invisible fibers at every spin cycle. Microplastics, now omnipresent and imperceptible, undermine every simplified narrative of sustainability.
Images, objects, and residues
Could bacteria be engineered to digest plastic — and at what cost? SOAP enters laboratories to photograph molds and bacteria under microscopes, imagining biotechnological futures suspended between cure and catastrophe.
Elsewhere, the magazine follows the slimy trails left by snails in Vienna and Madrid, commissions an artisanal soap infused with hemp extract, and photographs Ignazio Gardella’s Tuberculosis asylum — architecture as an apparatus of hygiene, control, and care.
Art, fashion, and unclean aesthetics
Visually, SOAP rejects polish. Sofia Alazraki’s still lifes are sticky and unresolved. François Berthoud states he no longer wants to look at a computer. Olivier Zahm and Annabelle Wearthly melt under the sun until bodies and images blur. Naguel Rivero strips fashion to its bare structure.
Mircea Cantor carves Aleppo soap into sculptural forms that still carry the scent of war. Along the Ganges, Rid Burman photographs the collision of sacred water and floating plastic. A tribute to Giorgio Armani blends archival imagery with artificial intelligence.
Blood, language, and what soap cannot wash away
Anthea Hamilton confesses, “I’m an oil person.” Andrea Rinaldo defines humanity as “a biological invasion.” Maurizio Cattelan reminds us that art is not a detergent. Essays explore saints and dirt, stains as scars, instinct as raw matter, and exclusion within the supposedly inclusive gay community.
Blood recurs as a motif — from Philip Roth’s The Human Stain to red meat consumption and industrial farming. Soap removes blood easily. Systems, less so.
Water, the final mirror
Water runs through the entire issue: falling clean from the sky, filtered by stone, flowing through cities and pipes, polluted, purified, scarce, destructive — and finally reaching the sea. Filthy and wounded, yet irresistibly beautiful.
Standing on a bridge, watching water pass beneath us, SOAP leaves one unresolved question:
If we need water to wash with soap, how will we clean the water we have dirtied with that very soap?
Lampoon #32, The Stained Issue
/ 6 cover versions
/ 432 pages
/ softcover
/ 2,2 kg
/ 24×32 cm
/ english
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