Acts of care dissolve my skin

Acts of care dissolve my skin begins with an installation built on a 10 kg block of soap, used both as a support for engraving and as a video projection surface. The choice of soap as the central material is not accidental: it functions as a banal domestic object yet one loaded with symbolism, a medium of cleaning and hygiene that is consumed in the very process of use. Through its perishable nature, soap becomes a material metaphor for the invisible labor of care, an ongoing and indispensable activity systematically ignored by the productivist logic of capitalism.
The texts engraved into the solid mass of soap form a temporary archive, inscriptions destined to disappear along with the erosion of the material. In this way, they formally reproduce the mechanisms through which domestic labor, repetitive, cyclical, and oriented toward sustaining life, is consumed and erased without leaving visible traces in official history. Engraving thus becomes a performative practice of inscribing memory into fragile matter, questioning the relationship between the ephemeral and the durable, between the presence of the gesture and the absence of its recognition.
From an eco feminist perspective, soap becomes a “material body” of unpaid labor, carrying within it the tension between care and exploitation, between the reproduction of life and the structural exploitation of that reproduction. At the same time, the work functions as a critique of the “invisible economy of care” (Silvia Federici, Maria Mies), in which women’s physical and emotional energy is displaced from the productive sphere and absorbed into capitalist mechanisms without recognition or remuneration.
The video projection amplifies this tension by layering the visual onto the material, opening a space of negotiation between the physical dimension of the object and the immaterial dimension of representation. In this interstice, the work proposes a reflection on material memory and on the possibility of transforming the repeated and seemingly silent gestures of care into acts of resistance, revolt, or symbolic reinscription.
Acts of care dissolve my skin thus situates itself at the intersection of visual poetry and social critique, of object, text, and image, functioning as an artistic experiment that materializes the feminist theory of care work and places it in a sensorial and ephemeral visual framework. The work proposes not only a denunciation of the invisibility of this labor but also a reconsideration of its political and mythological potential, an emergence of a new feminine archive, sculpted in fragile matter and dissolved into foam.
Exhibited in a co-curated exhibition: The reclaimed anthology of flowers, Tranzit.ro/Iasi, 12 september-5 october, 2025