Soft Sabotage, Graduation Project
KABK Den Haag, 2025
Soft Sabotage is a soap-based intervention that reintroduces bodily residues into monitored water systems, transforming personal care into a material disruption of automated measurement logics.
Bathrooms are private spaces, mostly invisible to others, but also where our bodies cross into larger systems: water, data, infrastructure. That moment — where something intimate becomes public — is the starting point. What we flush away doesn’t disappear. It enters monitored systems, filtered for information and turned into data.
Soft Sabotage takes the form of a bar of soap. A small, familiar object, but here it becomes a tool of participation. Instead of cleaning traces away, it reintroduces them. The idea is to flip the usual logic of purification: not to clarify, but to blur. Not to extract meaning, but to bring in the systems that do.
🚨🔄💦ANTI STRESS ANTI INDEX ANTI DOSE ANTI CUNTY ANTI ANTI ANTI💦🔄🚨
from the archives: 2023 campaign for ›zukunft tanzt‹ — a festival for dance and performance in FFM by @co.opdancecompany grateful to Ida & Laurin for inviting us (again) to blur the lines between movement and design 🧡💙
from the archives: campaign for the annual dance and performance festival ›zukunft tanzt‹ 2022 in frankfurt.
instagram, poster and flyers.
briefing: dance, movement, fluidity, exchange, learning processes, collaboration.
thank you ida & laurin! @co.opdancecompany
Our final graduate takeover of 2025!
Julia Löffler (@julia.loeff ) is a designer whose work explores everyday objects and routines as entry points for critical reflection on socio-political systems.
“Soft Sabotage” is a private intervention within a public system. Presented as a spatial installation, the work engages with wastewater surveillance — a public health tool that collects biochemical residues from sewage to monitor drug use, stress levels, nutrition and other population-wide health indicators. These systems claim to protect, but they can also classify, divide, and produce visibility without consent.
The project connects this form of systemic measurement with the intimate act of washing. Collective waste — once mixed and anonymized in sewage — becomes readable data. But what if this datasoup turns into datasoap? The soap returns to the system not as evidence, but as interference: a private object moving through a public drain. It doesn’t clarify — it disturbs. It slips through the measured stream like a void, opening uncertainty between traces. Not hiding outside the data, but within it — questioning the line between source and signal.
Soap becomes a tool of soft sabotage, reimagined to interrupt the logic of observation from within the supposed privacy of the bathroom. A diluted threshold between the body and the system.
With kind support from @youwish.craft — you wish it was just soap.
The Wardian Case, a house-shaped box made of wood and glass, revolutionized the global transportation of plants in the 19th century. Originally developed for transporting tropical plants from colonies to Europe, it illustrates how the colonial plant trade intertwines with the contemporary availability and perception of tropical flora. When comparing the architectural developments – from the wooden box to glass showcases and from portable cases to majestic conservatories or entire greenhouse complexes – it becomes evident how deeply intertwined the colonial plant trade is with today’s trends in plant cultivation.
„Framing Paradise – The Colonial Roots of Botanical Beauty“ is part of the project „unmapping territories“ a collaboration between @nationaalarchief and @nonlinearnarrative
