Julia Löffler

“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.