iris andraschek
sapun ghar by iris andraschek For many centuries the knowledge of the Aleppo Soap´s traditional production process has been passed on. When encountering these soaps during her residence in Istanbul in 2015, Iris Andraschek was wondering how this traditional work was kept alive after its producers left the city Aleppo and Syria due to the war. Her research brought her to Gaziantep where a producer of traditional Aleppo Soap had relocated his factory.
Andraschek´s project includes soap installations, videos, photographs and drawings on the soap production as well as the harvest of laurel and the production of laurel oil in Antakya. Doing so, it gives hints on universal topics like the drawing up of frontiers in regions of a shared flora. War within these frontiers endangers cultural heritage like monuments but also of immaterial kind – like the traditional Aleppo Soap.