Created in 2024 by Barnabé Fillion and Sofia Elias, the project explores the symbolic, physical, and cultural dimensions of soap through a multidisciplinary approach.

The first exhibition, Lavati la bocca con il sapone (“Wash your mouth out with soap”), reinterprets a once-reprimanding Italian phrase as a meditation on language, power, and expression. Like a soap bubble—delicate, fleeting, yet reflective—Soap Culture embodies transition and change.

The inaugural edition took place in Venice, a city shaped by fluidity and reinvention, featuring installations, performances, and sound works that invited artists to engage with soap in its many forms.

Solid yet dissolving, cleansing yet carrying traces, appearing only to disappear—soap embodies the fleeting nature of touch and time. At Arpa, this transience is embraced through scented soap cases, infused with fragrance to evolve and imprint memory.

Soap Culture extends this dialogue, using this material as a vessel for exploring cycles of transformation, erasure, and renewal.

A key figure in this dialogue, Sofia Elias is an architect whose practice extends into playground design, where intuition, movement, and materiality intersect. Her work is rooted in a tactile understanding of form, often incorporating recycled plastics and resins to explore the expressive potential of materials.

Set in a historic Venetian space entrusted to Murmur by the family of architect Paolo Piva, it continues to evolve as a site for artistic and cultural exploration, where soap remains the medium through which ideas dissolve, reform, and take shape anew.