Quarantine Diaries

Quarantine Diaries brings together more than 3,000 photographs of used bars of soap submitted by people from cities across the world during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The project began in March 2020, when the artist started sharing photographs of soaps that had been kept by his mother years earlier. Friends soon began sending images of the soaps they were using during lockdown, followed by contributions from people the artist had never met. Participants submitted a photograph, the place and the date. The images were presented chronologically, preserving the time and location of each contribution.

No instructions were given beyond sharing the object. Rather than producing artworks, participants documented an ordinary object that had acquired an unexpected intimacy during isolation. Worn by daily use, each soap became the record of a particular moment, place and body.

Presented together, thousands of individual photographs reveal a collective portrait formed through repetition rather than similarity. The exhibition transformed this dispersed archive into a shared visual diary of a period in which everyday life was experienced in separation, yet connected through a common domestic gesture.