Soap

In this project, Ting-tong Chang utilises an instance of fake news that circulated during World War I, “Kadaververwertungsanstalt” (literally, Carcass-Utilisation Factory). This was a rumour deliberately spread by the British Intelligence agencies.

By way of mass media, they fabricated and circulated a story about the Germans having built a secret factory in the heart of a German forest where they dissolved corpses into soap for army use when resources were scarce. Along with illustrations, fabricated reports combined conspiracy theory and already existent prejudice towards Germany in order to facilitate a shift in British public opinion in support for the war. Using this story as his base, Chang constructed his own fictional soap-making factory, which also serves as a centre of information production, turning soap into a tangible metaphor for information.