Graffiti, dirt, dust, leaves, snow, slush, water, weeds, bars, strip joints, corruption, factories, sex shops, stray animals, sewage, garbage, pollution, poverty, crowds, noise, and odor have all been seen as problems of cleanliness in the city.

Soap, hosted by Pecha Kucha Montréal and the CCA, explores interesting and problematic issues of cleanliness within the context of Montréal. Presentations take the format of 20 slides x 20 seconds each.

Take a Bath, Jennifer Blair
Following the Flush, Andrew Emond
Where the Snow Goes, Patrick Evans
C’EST DU PROPRE !, Peter Fianu
Animals in the City, Jason Prince
Sanctuaires d’Hygie, oratoires de Panacée : la santé dans la Cité, Nicolas Reeves

Reporting afterwards, Lev Bratishenko, CCA staff member and one of the organisers of the event, describes the evening:

“Jason Prince got five hundred people with beer in their hands to be quiet and listen to his energetic exploration on the theme of animals in the city, from the end of the urban abattoir to the (commercially profitable) return of backyard chickens. Next, Peter Fianu presented a witty and insightful discourse on typologies of cleanliness; no concept stayed pure for long. Jennifer Blair finished off the first half with a tour through the history of public bathhouses and their social associations as they changed over the last hundred years. There was a half-hour pause so the bartenders had something to do, and then Patrick Evans resumed the evening. He presented his odyssey into the heart of a mountain of dirty snow, and the discoveries he made there. Then Nicolas Reeves took us on a critical and eye-opening investigation of hospitals, where cleanliness is not just keeping the dirty world out, but also keeping the sick world in. Andrew Emond closed the evening with his portfolio of sewer explorations and an invitation to the audience to reconsider the spaces beneath our feet as architectural and potentially beautiful.”

The definitions of the problem of cleanliness have shifted with currents of politics and morality, theories of the city, and developments in technology and medicine. There have been as many approaches as there have been problems, most of them based on a conflation of visual cleanness with physical hygiene. Street sweeping, paving stones, and later asphalt all began as attempts to expel dirt from the city and these urges culminated in the slum-clearance and Modernist rationalization projects of the 1950s and 60s. More recently, the cities of Barcelona and Pisa have tested robots for garbage pickup and street sweeping, while New York has a taken a variety of prickly metal devices that prevent people from lingering on urban surfaces.

Soap continues a line of research that began at the CCA in 2005 with the exhibition Sense of the City, which proposed an approach to the city based on a sensorial urbanism.