In 1882, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen released his play, An Enemy of the People, (Henrik, Rudall, N., 2007) or En folkefiende, a story about a medical officer and civic-minded man – Dr. Stockmann – who worked at a spa in his small hometown. Over the course of the story, Stockmann reveals his personal belief that the town’s spa water had been contaminated with bacteria – a suspicion eventually confirmed by lab tests. Stockmann has an article printed to this effect in the local press, risking the closure of the spa and the subsequent economic ruin of the town. What ensues is a multi-player debate around the sanctity of truth and the greater good at the sacrifice of a nation’s prosperity. By the end of the play, Stockmann endures total social persecution, suffering attacks of vandalisation to his home and becoming a ridiculed pariah to friends and family. Despite this blanket excommunication, Stockmann pledges to stay in the town he has fought for standing by his calling to hold truth to power at all costs. As he does, he promises to “proclaim the truth at every street corner! […] write to newspapers in other towns!” and avows that “the whole land shall know how things go on here!” On October 16, 2017, at 2:35pm, journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia published the last post of her Running Commentary, metaphorically crying out the same decree and devotion to truth as the character of Stockmann had in the 19th century. “There are crooks everywhere you look now,” she wrote, “the situation is desperate”. Later that day she would die – killed by the force of a detonated car bomb as she drove away from her family home. Attard builds a work that spells out those final words in over two metres of traditional soap boxes laid beside one another, leaving no space between letters. This deliberate constriction symbolises the suffocating effect of corruption and its asphyxiation of those who fight it. Throughout her lifetime, Caruana Galizia had also been subject to widespread societal condemnation. Her house too had been vandalised on several occasions, she had been denigrated, humiliated, and alienated. She worked in solitary quarters, her physical isolation juxtaposing the reach of her investigative web of sources. Like Stockmann, her vocation was to reveal the contaminated segments of society. In doing so, she was not only classified as an outcast, but paid a high financial price – at the time of her death she was besieged by over forty libel cases, of which one had left her fiscal assets seized and her livelihood prey to debilitating inertia. Attard’s Libels Make a Book displays an unrelenting list of the libel prosecutors, his elegant graphic order contrasting the disorder of wellbeing brought about by the onslaught of the cases. During his own solitary confinement throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Attard’s contemplation on the life of Daphne Caruana Galizia – who had been a friend and supporter of the artist – was refocused. Prompted by the extended rumination afforded by lockdown, Attard returned to a photograph he had taken years earlier of the journalist, a tender portrait of a woman he had come to know beyond her public persona. Im Media Res (In the Middle of Things) becomes the plumb line to the scope of the SOAP TO THINK WITH series. Daphne, as Attard knew her, is not featured purely as a martyr. Her image becomes the narrative drive to Attard’s encyclopaedic analysis of ten years of corruption, scandal and finally, an enforced, society-wide understanding of the isolation she once endured. Caruana Galizia’s fate within the narrative arc of SOAP TO THINK WITH becomes an instance or ‘event’ that the entire content of the series orbits around. Attard aligns her assassination as the ‘Event’ according to the philosophy of Alain Badiou, wherein an incidence suddenly interrupts and drastically abstracts the social scene, rupturing the veneer of normality and inviting a rethink of reality. In other words, Caruana Galizia’s murder becomes the event that holds the power to jolt collective consciousness out of hypernormality and towards an acute appraisal of not just matters of morality, but a summation of the soul. As such, Attard prescribes to Badiou’s central proposition that truth comes to occupy a ‘hole’ in our common knowledge, and that the power of the truth of an event can change the basic parameters of how the world is known and understood to us all. (McLaverty-Robinson, 2014)