Residuum

2020, installation, soap balls made of peanuts and shea butter installation size variable (each soap ball ca. ∅ 15 cm)

Installation view at Thread of Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

In collaboration with l’Association Savon de Tamba, Tambacounda
and Ami Soumbou Cissokho, Ami Savené, Kadia Cissokho, Fanta Cissokho, Sinthian

We’re trapped in assemblies of temporalities, with a past that needs healing, a present global society with much in disrepair, and simultaneously a future we wish to prevent from becoming a repetition of the past.

In Residuum, Jeewi Lee merges these temporal planes into a global botanical story through the close examination of two seemingly banal consumer products: soap and peanuts. Beneath the surface of the palm-sized balls of brown soap an intertwining planetary history unfolds, a microcosm that the artist twists and turns seeking nuances of that which has been and that which is possible. At first glance, we recognise soap as an everyday product made from fatty acids and used for personal hygiene; in its basic formula, usage and form it has been culturally rooted in many societies for centuries. Its usage is tied to comprehensive hygiene and medical histories spanning narratives from cleanliness and self-care to spiritual purification and potential renewal – as explored by Jeewi Lee in Ashes to Ashes (2019).

In Residuum, soap, with all its functions, becomes a vehicle for a further story, namely that of the peanut. The artist has set the narrative far from the world’s capitalist centres, in a rural part of southeast Senegal. Here she explores the pervasive power of a natural resource that has re-shaped entire landscapes. The peanut, one of the fuels of Western industrialisation, reveals the hierarchical interplay of colonial relations: between rise and exploitation, factory and plantation, centre and periphery, visibility and invisibility. The aftermath: desertification and migration, exhaustion of man and nature, the erosion of life forms and knowledge. Feminist decolonial thinker Francoise Vergès describes it thus: „Colonization laid waste upon the earth“. Residuum is as well an artistic contemplation of the possibilities of cleansing a dark (dirty) history, as it is a move away from exploitation towards care. In her research and experimentation, the artist involved soap manufacturers in Tambacounda and Sinthian, calling on their individual competencies and skills for a communal result. The manufacturing process of the objects remains visible. Every ball of soap is a unique entity bearing traces of the hands that formed it.

Working process: Sinthian & Tambacounda (Senegal) 2019

Exhibition view: OH Gallery Dakar, 2020